Dr. Daniel Ìgbín’bí Coleman (they/he) is a transdisciplinary organic intellectual, organizer, and performing artist. Dr. Coleman uses the phrase “organic intellectual” when referring to his scholarly work and approach to research because he is invested in creating and archiving knowledge that is born from the practice of living and being in relation to his communities and broader worlds. If they have a research “agenda” it is this: to be in a pedagogical relationship to all of life – in other words, what is it that the practice of living teaches us and what theorizations can come out of this/what theorizations are useful for helping to name a plurality of lived realities.
Given this orientation to intellectual production and the various life compositions that structure Dr. Coleman’s lived experience and those of his communities, his work is invested in how Black (Afro-descendant) and Brown (particularly Native/Indigenous and people who get called Latin American and Latinx) people navigate a world not built for them by creating new worlds, recovering elements of ancestral worlds, and practicing ways of thinking and being that best serve the liberation of our peoples.
As a queer and non-binary transman, Dr. Coleman is also invested in how women, trans and gender non-conforming people, and other folks within queer communities navigate authentic embodiment, kinship, activism, family, and community formation within hostile environments, institutions, and knowledge systems. What motivates his research questions is how people continue to choose life, healing, and generous knowledge production despite forces of death and destruction that are ever-present.
Dr. Coleman’s work also moves with pressing questions about anthropocentrism and millennial relationships to ecology (as outlined by non-Western cosmological systems
and spiritual knowledge/wisdom). For this reason, his work has been and remains deeply invested in other forms of moving with ontology (questions of being) and epistemology (questions about knowledge production). Within these concerns, their work increasingly finds itself turning to metaphysics and quantum physics to ask how people who are inheritors of colonial harms turn to forces of “nature” to generate life.
His new book, "Refusals and Reinventions: Engendering New Indigenous and Black Life Across the Americas," will be released this March. There will be a book launch party at Charis Books and More on April 17, 2024. Congratulations, Dr. Coleman!