Dr. Hadiya Sewer is an Africana philosopher. They currently serve as the Director of the Virgin Islands Caribbean Cultural Center at the University of the Virgin Islands. Dr. Sewer’s work uses a non-sovereign territory in the Caribbean, the United States Virgin Islands, as a case study for tracing the conceptions of freedom and the human that exist under contemporary colonialism. Sewer earned their Bachelors in Sociology from Spelman College and their M.A. and Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. They recently held a Visiting Scholar position in the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University and a Research Fellowship in the African and African American Studies Program at Stanford University. Their scholarship focuses on environmental justice and Africana decolonial, feminist, queer, and political theories. They are currently working on two monographs titled, “(De)Colonial Desires: Blackness, Aporia, and the Afterlives of the Dead,” and “Black as Nature: Climate Disaster, Covid-19, and the Coloniality of Power.” Dr. Sewer’s research, teaching, and advocacy provide phenomenological, ethnographic, and historical examinations of anti-blackness, black cosmologies, colonialism, imperialism, and the climate crisis. As a community-engaged scholar, Sewer is also the President and Co-Founder of St.JanCo: the St. John Heritage Collective, a land rights and cultural heritage preservation nonprofit in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.