Nikki Young and Benae Beamon Talk about Love, Work, and Ethics

Benae Beamon is from North Carolina, where she started dancing and joined the acclaimed North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble under the direction of Gene Medler. She went on to earn a BA from Colgate University and an MA from Yale University and is currently completing her PhD at Boston University in Religious Studies. Her scholarship and art focus on black queer and trans populations and the ethical value of black artistic expression. She continues to create artistic work, through dance, both as a solo artist and with Subject:Matter, a Boston based tap dance company, under the direction of choreographer, Ian Berg.   Nikki Young is a black queer ethicist who uses scholarship and teaching to generate, cultivate, and feature liberative ways of being. A graduate of UNC-Asheville (BA), Candler School of Theology (MDiv and ThM), and Emory University (PhD), Nikki focuses her work on race, gender, sexuality, family, and ethics and is particularly interested in the impact of black queerness on moral reasoning. She currently contributes her time and skills to Bucknell University's departments of Women's and Gender Studies and Religious Studies and has published two books, Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination (2016) and In Tongues of Mortals and Angels: A De-Constructive Theology of God-Talk in Acts and Paul (2018). Nikki is now working on a new manuscript tentatively titled We Plead the Blood of Freedom: A Transnational Ethics of Black Queer Fugitivity.