Meet Kamalani M. F. H. Johnson, Brown University
Project Title: Relational Sovereignties: Binding Futures, Performing Intimacies, and Insurgent Archives
Kamalani M. F. H. Johnson is the Artemis A. W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Johnson earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, specializing in Indigenous politics and political theory. As a political theorist, literary theorist, and literary historian, Johnson’s research investigates the deployment of state statutory law, property regimes, and carceral surveillance as mechanisms of colonial management, alongside the counter-infrastructures designed by subaltern communities to preserve relational and intellectual sovereignty. Utilizing an elite text-critical mastery of nineteenth- and twentieth-century non-English print networks, Johnson’s current book project, Insurgent Archives: Intellectual Binding and Political Ontologies of Refusal, theorizes pūkuʻi (binding) as a Kanaka Maoli methodology for refusing biopolitical containment. Johnson is a recipient of the 2026 Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Award, a 2026 Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) at The New School for Social Research, and this project has received back-to-back funding from the American Political Science Association (APSA), including the 2025 Advancing Research Grant for Indigenous Politics and the 2026–2027 Advancing Research Grant for Early Career Scholars. His peer-reviewed research on intellectual sovereignty, language revitalization, gender and sexuality, and philosophy appears or is forthcoming in flagship journals including American Quarterly, PMLA, Biography, Hūlili, ADVA, and Journal of World Philosophies.
About the APSA Advancing Research Grants for Early Career Scholars
The APSA Diversity and Inclusion Advancing Research Grants provide support for research that examines political science phenomena affecting historically underserved communities and underrepresented groups and communities. In July 2026, APSA awarded 15 projects for the APSA Diversity and Inclusion Advancing Research Grant for Early Career Scholars for a combined total award amount of 30,000.
Read about Advancing Research Grants for Early Career Scholars
Be the first to comment