Anima Adjepong (they/them), department head and associate professor of women’s gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, brings decades of intellectual and community engagement with transnational sexualities—experience that they creatively meld with critical sociologies to add heft to the editorial team of Sex & Sexualities.
Adjepong’s research merges their interest in sport, transnational politics, race, immigration, class, and sexualities to engender pioneering public sociologies. Their groundbreaking book Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra (University of North Carolina Press 2021) best highlights Adjepong’s ethical, transnational scholarship. Adjepong explores how gender and sexuality shape how Ghanaians in Houston and Accra inhabit and practice class and racial identities.
Adjepong’s research for this book led them to engage more deeply with queer Ghanaian communities and the Ghanaian diaspora. In 2021, following pressure from religious leaders, a prominent LGBT+ community center in Accra was shut down, followed by the arrests of queer activists. In response, Adjepong founded, and is currently executive director of, Silent Majority, Ghana, a queer feminist network that offers political education and organizes Africans on the continent and across the diaspora to challenge legislative, cultural, and religious assaults on queer freedom. In other words, in the best traditions of public sociology, Adjepong translates their sociological research into real-world interventions. Adjepong has also published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and has edited books on race, gender/sexuality, and sports.
It is not just their intellectual originality and public scholarship that they bring to Sex & Sexualities. As co-editor, they will bring the added value of their creative practice among diverse publics. Adjepong is a published poet and is also completing a film based on their research and practice in feminist indigenous spiritualities and queer freedoms that offer maps for rendering critical theory into concrete steps toward social transformation. This experience translating theoretically and empirically rich sociologies through writing in different registers and in different genres demonstrates Adjepong’s skill with engaging diverse reading publics.
Editorial Experience
Editorial ExperienceAdjepong has served as an ad hoc reviewer for numerous sociological and interdisciplinary scholarly journals, including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Qualitative Sociology, Politique Africaine, Sociology of Sport Journal, and International Review for the Sociology of Sport. They have also reviewed book manuscripts for various academic and trade presses.
Adjepong’s service on the editorial board of Gender & Society has had a particular impact. They have assisted the journal tremendously in transnationalizing its authorship, bringing in critical perspectives on gender/sexuality and sports from Global South scholar activists. Demonstrating a deep commitment to an ethic of racial care, they have guided Global South authors to the journal, providing critical feedback, engagement, and mentorship in envisioning feminist sociologies. As an editorial board member of Gender & Society, they have endeavored tirelessly to bring to the fore Global South scholars in support of the journal’s vision in highlighting transnational scholarship.
Vision for the Journal
The experience and sociological imagination Adjepong will bring to Sex & Sexualities will help demonstrate the elasticity of our discipline to address social problems beyond the Global North that have heretofore been unacknowledged and unaddressed. As American sociologists in the United States, it is impossible for us to ignore the systematic dismantling of critical sociologies on campuses across the country. Many scholars in the Global South and Eastern Europe have already been living and practicing sociology under these neocolonial, neoliberal, and ultranationalist impositions. While scholarship in the “west” has been imagined as the engine of the discipline, what can “marginal” and marginalized sociologies bring to the disciplinary table? Adjepong’s editorship offers just that. They will foster critical perspectives that will broaden disciplinary borders so essential to invigorating our sociologies.
Anima Adjepong will serve as co-editor with RF Plante for the remainder of the current editorial term ending on December 31, 2027.