Jenna Hanchey

Scholar | Writer | Performer
imagining and enacting better futures

Research

Fiction

Teaching

Performance

About Me

“badass fairy”
🖤🐘🤍💜
she/her

I’m continually searching for radical futures, reflecting over the racial and colonial legacies of our pasts, and laboring to enact justice in the present. My academic work critically examines aid, development, and volunteer work in Africa. My creative work aims to open imaginative possibilities. I hail from Southwest Michigan and now live in Phoenix, where I work as Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Critical/Cultural Studies in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University .

A graduate student once called me a “badass fairy.” I attempt to live up to the title.

Research

Aid Media

I’ve written articles about aid campaign media, particularly viral videos, and how even the organizations that attempt to portray African agency often do so in ways that are Westerncentric and reinforce coloniality.

NGOs in Tanzania

My first book, The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO, is forthcoming in Fall 2023 from Duke University Press. It examines how decolonial possibility emerges from the collapse of normative aid operations and subjectivities.

Africanfuturism

I am currently writing a second book on Africanfuturism, examining how Africanfuturist fiction and film imagines liberatory African futures that challenge, reinvent, and eschew Western logics of development. I have been awarded a 2022 NEH Summer Stipend for this work.

Fiction

I’m a member of Codex and Associate Member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA).

Hello, This is Automatic Antigrief: What Problem Can I Solve for you Today?

What happens when we don’t allow ourselves to grieve?
Nature, April 2022

Up the River, Over Mountains, Across the Sea

Cozy fantasy flash about searching for a place in a world that draws unforgiving lines around identity.
Wyngraf Magazine, April 2022

And more…

Teaching

Courses

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses focused on racism, colonialism, difference, gender, and culture in communication.

Media Appearances

I have appeared in podcasts and video panels about African Communication Studies, dystopia and alternative futurisms, race and campus climate, and the futures of feminism.