Meet your cohosts, Kohar and Iman!
Our story begins in the woods of New Hampshire...no, but really...
We're two best friends who met at Dartmouth College and have been bonding over our nerdom since. We started Name It! to share the ideas we've picked up from books, classrooms, sister-friends, and ancestors. Ideas that have helped us name what it means to live at the intersections. Each episode we do the reading and research on one of those ideas so you don't have to. Whether it's Audre Lorde's notion of "the erotic" or Toni Morrison's "safe harbors," consider Name It ! your encyclopodia of big ideas that are gonna change how you talk about the world... and you can go ahead and consider us your newest internet besties!
Kohar Avakian
Kohar Avakian is a Nipmuc, Black, and Armenian mixed media artist, visual storyteller, and scholar from Worcester, Massachusetts, the ancestral land of her tribe, the Nipmuc Nation, and home to one of the oldest Armenian communities in the U.S. She holds a B.A. in History, modified with Native American Studies, from Dartmouth College and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale. As a descendant of genocide survivors still awaiting reparations, she has experienced the unparalleled power of learning about other peoples' histories through their own eyes firsthand. Adding vibrancy and color to her life as a graduate student, photography, oral history interviews, and multi-media art (digital collage, visual art, ceramics) have provided her an outlet to explore the intersection of race, reparations, memory, kinship, and virtual presence in the digital 21st century. Her essay “An Inter/Racial Love History” will be featured in the forthcoming UT Press anthology We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora (March 2023).
Iman AbdoulKarim
Iman AbdoulKarim is a Black Muslim scholar from Akron, OH in the Department of Religious Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 with a B.A. in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, cum laude. She has published on Muslim women’s participation in Black Lives Matter movement and as a 2017-2018 US-UK Fulbright Scholar researched Muslim women’s activism in British feminist networks. For her doctoral research, Iman plans to examine how twentieth and twentieth first century black radical thinkers took up religious, spiritual, and metaphysical thought to imagine beyond the realities of anti-blackness. She spends a lot of time thinking about blackness as survival, secularism, who gets to know what, and the ambiguities between what's considered religious, radical, and insane.