April Petillo (Assistant Professor, with a gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity focus at Northern Arizona University) honed her current interests through GBV non-profit work among vulnerable (or targeted) communities. April interweaves Native American/Indigenous, comparative/critical sociolegal, critical trafficking, feminist, and queer studies, re/considering lived experiences often overlooked to highlight encoded racial, gendered, and sexualized politics. April focuses on exploitation originating in settler-colonial and conquest logics and how targeted communities embody and harness resistant joy. Her primary projects highlight legally encoded racial, gendered, and sexualized politics and multifaceted coalition-building.
April is committed to public-facing scholarship that helps us build societies where we can all thrive. In addition to supporting local anti-racist and gender violence, April has authored “A Sketch of Arrivantcy: Towards Decolonized Solidarity across Indigenous and Black Divides (Frontiers 2020), “Unsettling Ourselves: Notes on Self-Reflective Listening Beyond Discomfort” (Feminist Anthropology 2020), and “Marking Embodied Borders: Compulsory Settler Sexuality, Indigeneity, and U.S. Law“ (Women’s Studies in Communication 2019). April authored the chapter “Trafficking Indianness by Legislating Settler Sexuality Logics” in White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking, edited by Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih (2023) and coauthored “Rendered as Political Pawns: Chibok Girls, Ebola, and the Exercise of Political Will” with Jane Eggers for Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in Africa: Discourses, Practices, and Policies, edited by Egodi Uchendu and Ngozi Edeagu (2021). She has also co-edited Researching Gender-Based Violence: Embodied and Intersectional Approaches (2021) with Heather Hlavka.