BA, Oberlin College, 2021, East Asian Studies

The summer of 2020 marked a dramatic shift in race consciousness around the globe. The murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, coupled with the rise of Anti-Asian hate crimes, sparked a global outcry of support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and renewed interest in solidarity between Black and Asian communities as a means to organize against systemic racism and white supremacy. This paper sets out to investigate the intersectional histories of oppression faced by these communities, offers a timely analysis of the history of Afro-Asian Solidarity domestically and on the international stage, and explores the relevance of Afro-Asian allyship to contemporary social movements, #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate. Based on the analysis of scholarly and journalistic sources, I argue that the transnational progress made through Afro-Asian solidarity in the global freedom struggle provides a compelling example and invaluable blueprint of the radical potential for Afro-Asian Solidarity in the age of Black Lives Matter.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

“Hushed Articulations: Theorizing Representations of Black Women's Post-Violence Sexuality” interrogates representations of Black women's sexuality in the aftermath of sexual violence - what I term “post-violence sexuality.” Following feminist and anti-rape activism of the 1970s and 1980s, the prevalence and ramifications of sexual violence gained public, activist, and intellectual attention. However, neoliberal subject formation and entrenched public reliance on personal empowerment rather than social, political, or institutional intervention have converged and contributed to increasingly polarized conceptualizations of victimhood and survivorship in the 21st century. Black women's relationship to these post-violence identities is especially fraught. “Hushed Articulations” intervenes in rape crisis and anti-rape feminist debates by considering Black women's specific cultural relationship to the prevailing linear conceptualization of trauma recovery that delineates transformation from victim to survivor or discursively prioritizes survivor over victim when addressing people who have experienced sexual violence. Adding to a growing body of Black feminist literary and cultural criticism that theorizes the relationship between violence, autonomy, and Black women's sexuality, this dissertation examines the murky overlap of arousal, trauma, and compulsory performative heroism in Black women's articulations of post-violence sexuality to demythologize both victimhood and survivorship. “Hushed Articulations” argues that a fuller range of Black women's post-violence sexuality and possibility is represented in Black women's fiction and memoir – a range that is not reliant on dichotomized social constructions of victimhood and survivorship, and that other forms of media created for and about people who have experienced sexual violence often leave unacknowledged. Chapter one is a broad overview of anti-rape activism in the United States, establishing how the nuances of (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, Theatre

Performance and even vulnerability are not inherently liberatory or revolutionary, however when we set this intention, we produce a product and a framework that seeks to liberate not only self, but others. As one young woman attempts to make sense of the world by first making sense of herself, “The Liberation Will Be Televised: Performance as Liberatory Practice” explores the process of producing a product in search of collective liberation through performance. Following in the footsteps of many Black feminist theorists, the curation of this portfolio invokes a Narrative approach, taking the reader on a journey of liberatory practice.

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2017, History

During the antebellum era, black activists organized themselves into insurgent networks, with the goal of achieving political and racial equality for all black inhabitants of the United States. The Negro Convention Movement, herein referred to as the Black Convention Movement, functioned on state and national levels, as the chief black insurgent network. As radical black rights groups continue to rise in the contemporary era, it is necessary to mine the historical origins that influence these bodies, and provide contexts for understanding their social critiques. This dissertation centers on the agency of the participants, and reveals a black insurgent network seeking its own narrative of liberation through tactics and rhetorical weapons. This study follows in the footing of Dr. Howard Holman Bell, who produced bodies of work detailing the antebellum Negro conventions published in the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, this work inserts itself into the historiography of black radicals, protest movements, and racial debates of antebellum America, arguing for a successful interpretation of black insurgent action. Class, race, gender, religion, and politics, all combine within this study as potent framing devices. Together, the elements within this effort, illustrates the Black Convention Movement as the era's premier activist organization that inadvertently pushed the American nation toward civil war, and the destruction of institutionalized slavery.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, English

Drawing on Black feminist thought, queer theory, and queer of color critique, Touching History argues that Black women in the Post-Civil Rights era have employed diverse technologies in order to produce fictionalized narratives which counter the neoliberal imperative to forget the past. Black feminist and queer theorists have described the potential for artistic imaginings to address gaps in the historical record and Touching History follows this line of theory. Touching History examines an archive of Black women's cultural productions since the 1970s which includes novels, short stories, essays, experimental video film, digital music videos and visual albums. Reading across these diverse media and genres, this project considers how Black women have made use of the affordances of specific technologies in order to tell stories which may be fictional yet reveal “a kind of truth” about the embodied and affective experiences of the past. These mediated images and narratives serve as extensions of their bodies that push against static ideas of the Black female body. Whether it's the image in a film or video, or the digital avatar presented through social media, Touching History argues these representations are intimately linked to the corporeal presence of the Black female artist. Alongside technologies of the video camera and the digital camera, this project also considers other embodied technologies of expression including sadomasochism and the book and considers how these also provide a means for Black women to touch history. Examining the novels of Thulani Davis and Marci Blackman, the short fiction of Alice Walker, the experimental films of Cheryl Dunye, and music videos created by singers Erykah Badu and Beyonce, this project examines the expression of queer desires by Black women. In this project “queer” is not synonymous with gay and lesbian or same-sex desires, although it may at times be used to describe them. Queer desires in this project also include the (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Womens Studies

This project investigates the ways that the Black female body has been constructed using corpulence as a central narrative that reflects anxieties about race, gender, class, sexuality, and national identity. It identifies how the performance of corpulence through the Black female body has particular ideological meanings that have been articulated through visual and narrative cultures. Corpulence is operative in defining rigid boundaries in regards to identity, which are built on constructed notions of whiteness and Blackness. Moreover, this study identifies corpulence as a facet of identity and illuminates how it intersects with race, gender, and class to relegate Black women to the bottom of American society. Through an analysis of several popular texts, this study illuminates the varied ways that the discourse involving corpulence reflects narratives that deploy race, gender, and class as signifiers of “authentic” American identity and restrict the social, economic, and political mobility of the Black female body. The analysis begins with a historical examination of how pertinent size has been to the construction of the Black female body in visual and narrative cultures and how this particular construction has worked to establish ideals regarding difference. It assesses the historical ‘Mammy' construction of the Black female body in an effort to identify how the physical attributes of this particular construction serve to nurture whiteness in general. The primary interest is to identify the function of corpulence in the construction of this caricature and analyze how it was composed as a signifier of ‘Blackness' that was used to establish, promote and sustain white supremacy through visual culture. Also, corpulence has been appropriated and used in Black folklore as a means to comical effect. This study illuminates the ways in which corpulence is performed in Black folklore as a means to denigrate the Black female body. Moreover, it traces this assault through ana (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, History

When did the 1960s end? Scholarly opinion holds that the spirit, energy and optimism that characterize the decade succumbed to infighting and fragmentation as the decade came to a close in 1968. My dissertation challenges this assertion by examining two influential and understudied student movements at San Francisco State College and City College of New York in 1968 and 1969. Often overlooked in favor of student protests that occurred on elite Ivy League campuses, these protests were characterized by multiracial coalitions that challenged the Eurocentric curriculum and lack of diversity at their colleges. These protests were watershed moments in higher education, and they brought about the creation of ethnic studies and the increased acceptance of students of color. In addition, the philosophy, tactics, and rhetoric espoused by these students contributed to the creation of a Third World Left, which included these students and their allies, as well as other activists of color. The activism of the Third World Left continued into the 1970s and became an important site in the continuation of radical politics, thus belying the notion that “the sixties” ended in declension in 1968. This dissertation will show that when diverse sites of activism are explored, rather than solely the white New Left, many movements outlasted the end of the 1960s, including many groups that were spawned as a result of the Third World student movement. This dissertation foregrounds the processes of coalition building among activists of color, as well as the rhetoric and philosophy developed by these students. By examining the many archival sources such as artifacts and documents from the strike, as well as interviews and oral histories with the activists, in addition to the sparse secondary sources that exist about the protests, I will argue for the seminal role of the Third World student movement in this period.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Women's Studies

My project investigates the ways that the representation of Black female revolutionary activists during the 1970s produced images and narratives of justice that have informed the artistic work of Black women over the past 30 years. My analysis begins with Black revolutionary icons, Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver, and the various historical discourses that informed the circulation, consumption and meaning of their images. Photographic images of these prominent Black female activists circulated in the sixties and seventies and produced important narratives about the primacy of Black male experience as representative of the Black liberation struggle. They also contributed to the mythological, Amazonian image of Black womanhood that developed into filmic images in blaxploitation films, featuring actresses like Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson. These films reflected anxieties about gender, race and sexuality.My analysis of visual images of icons such as Davis and Grier are linked to a legacy of revolutionary Black feminist rhetoric, representation and critique that continued in the literature of Black women in the eighties. Revolutionary imagery and Black feminist rhetoric embedded in the work of Black female writers and poets, such as Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, provided a space for a more complex and nuanced articulation of Black female revolutionary womanhood. More specifically, their use of the image of the Amazon and the willingness of Lorde and Walker to explore a Black female experience that included both strength and vulnerability were crucial to the development and visual articulation of revolution that emerged in work of Black women in the early nineties. The work of Black female artists such as Erykah Badu and Me'shell Ndegeocello are examples of the ways that young Black female musicians have appropriated and rearticulated Black feminist revolutionary rhetoric, iconography and aesthetics from the 1970s to explore what it means to be a Black female revolution (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Educational Studies

While Perkins V legislation and newer career and technical education programs were designed to prepare students for success in both college and career pathways and modern career and technical education programs are supposed to expand college and career readiness outcomes for students, there is a lack of research examining supports that promote the academic engagement and success of Black male students in high school career academies. Career academies are a type of high school reform initiative that is designed to prepare students for college and careers in career fields such as engineering and informing technology (Fletcher & Tan, 2022; Fletcher et al., 2018). In the 1970s, career academies were designed as career-oriented schools that delivered college preparatory instructional curriculum, and operated as smaller schools within larger schools (ACTE, 2019; NAF, 2023). Comprehensive school reform efforts like career academies are likely to ensure that Black male students are prepared for college and careers with personalized resources and services such as trade and apprenticeship pathways, work-based learning, early career exploration, guidance counseling, and college-level examination programs. In this study, I described the need for research to examine college and career readiness of high school Black male students at a NAF (formerly known as the National Foundation Academy) Academy of Engineering. I utilized the theoretical frameworks of college and career ready by Stone and Lewis (2012) and culturally relevant pedagogy by Ladson-Billings (1992) to review the research questions, background of the problem, problem statement, purpose statement, and significance of the study. Since Black males are a vulnerable group of youth with lower academic achievement and performance and barriers to career prospects and access to higher education (Brown et al., 2019; Hines et al., 2014; Wright, 2019), I explored the role of career academies, culturally relevant education for Bla (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

This dissertation connects the recent DEIB movement within organizations to larger social justice movements, specifically those that impact workers and the workplace. Critical human resource development (CHRD) professionals, who serve as “insider activists”, are highlighted due to their work to continue movement objectives within organizations. Through testimonios and critical platicas, this study explores how Black and Latino/x LGBTQ+ CHRD professionals, in particular, are experiencing the workplace, especially as it relates to their engagement with how DEIB is practiced within organizations. Through this study, these professionals provide insights into the ways that workplaces can be redesigned and reimagined to be more critically conscious and equitable spaces, especially for those from marginalized backgrounds. Their reflections can work to enhance the ways that DEIB is practiced within organizations. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, American Culture Studies

This dissertation is rooted in the general question: How do contemporary TV series featuring Black queer and trans representation highlight and address sociopolitical questions often found circulating within queer and cultural studies? Employing three programs, The Prancing Elites Project (2015), Empire (2015), and Pose (2018), this study argues that recent upticks in Black queer characters on TV provide room to move beyond traditional analyses often predicated on critical suspicion to instead engender readings revealing themes related to Black futurity, worldmaking, and coalition building, prominent topics within the fields of queer and cultural studies. Building from both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's articulation of reparative reading and prior scholarship often critical of Black queer televisual representation, this dissertation's interventions are both theoretical and methodological, presenting a recalibrated approach to gleaning the richness in Black queer media. Black Queer TV: Reparative Viewing and the Sociopolitical Questions of Our Now invigorates and broadens critical scholarship on media through nuancing programs depicting a range of Black queer people's represented experiences.

Doctor of Ministry , Ashland University, 2020, Doctor of Ministry Program

The purpose of this project was to discover why black Millennials, between the ages of twenty-four (24) and thirty-eight (38) years of age, attend and remain at the Greater Antioch Missionary Baptist Church of Pompano Beach, Florida. Thirty-five participants completed a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire that was collected and analyzed. The data disclosed the need for relevant preaching and teaching, strengthening family relationships, and hiring a Young Adult minister to meet the needs of Millennials at Greater Antioch Baptist Church.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2021, American Culture Studies

Ethnic Studies (ES) is the study of history, practices, and contributions of people of color and their descendants. Ethnic Studies has emerged as an academic discipline resulting from social activist groups of the late 1950s, and, subsequent student activism of the 1960s. In ways that were planned and improvised, Black scholar activists along with the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) fashioned the need for the development of curricula that provided an alternative to the traditional Eurocentric focus in many academic fields. An inquiry into the origin of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) qualifies in general some African Americans' responses to education in the U.S. and specifically at the first school to have ES in the state of Ohio. Alliances between activist student groups and individuals of diverse backgrounds led to the formation and development of a new academic discipline, Ethnic Studies at BGSU beginning in May 1970. The development of Ethnic Studies programming and curricula at BGSU emerged from a coalition of student activists advocating for Black Studies. BGSU's department is among the oldest in the nation focusing on interdisciplinary studies of race. African Americans organizing and sustaining Ethnic Studies at BGSU brought academic and artistic value and distinction to them and to the institution.

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2021, English-Composition

In this text, I examine the relationship of three concepts: healing, lived writing process, and the making of knowledge. This inquiry blends theory and practice, and it is situated within Black life writing. I situate my inquiry accordingly not to produce a collapsed framework of “racial healing,” but to show how Black life writing, while marginalized, is yet central. Though other scholarly work on healing and the writing process exists, I argue for a greater recognition of what I call "the lived writing process." I also argue that the lived writing process—as demonstrated by Black composition scholars—embodies healing and transformative knowledge-making, particularly within ethnography. Within the depth of this tradition, we may observe, grapple with, and universally consider what it means to heal.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Camp is a critical sensibility and a queer reading practice that allows women to simultaneously critique, resist, and enjoy stereotypes and conventional norms. It is both a performative strategy and a mode of reception that transforms resistance into pleasure. Scholarship on feminist camp recognizes a tradition of women using camp to engage with gender politics and play with femininity. Most of the scholarship focuses on women's camp in mainstream and popular culture and how they talk back to the patriarchy. Little work has been done on feminist camp outside of popular culture or on how women use camp to talk back to feminism. My dissertation adds to conversations about feminist camp by exploring a new facet of camp that talks back to feminism and challenges a feminist audience. I examine the work of three contemporary feminist and queer independent filmmakers: Anna Biller, Cheryl Dunye, and Bruce LaBruce to explore the different ways they subvert cinematic conventions to interrupt narrative, play with stereotypes, and create opportunities for pleasure as well as critique. I argue that these filmmakers operationalize a feminist camp gaze and open up space for a feminist camp spectatorship that engages critically with ideas about identity, sex, and feminism. In addition, I consider the ways in which other types of feminist cultural production, including sketch comedy and web series, use camp strategies to deploy a feminist camp gaze to push back against sexism and other forms of oppression while also parodying feminism, ultimately creating space for resistance, pleasure, and self-reflection.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Leadership and Change

The dissertation is a deep study of an iconic 20th century female, African American leader whose acclaim developed not only from her remarkable first generation post-Reconstruction Era beginnings, but also from her mid-century visibility among Negroes and some Whites as a principal spokesperson for her people. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune arose from the Nadir- the darkest period for Negroes after the Civil War and three subsequent US Constitutional Amendments. She led thousands of Negro women, despite social adversity, to organize around their own aspirations for improved social and material lives among America's diverse citizens., i.e. “the melting pot.” The subject of no fewer than thirty-two dissertation studies, numerable biographies, innumerable awards, and namesake educational institutions, Bethune ascended to public leadership roles. Her renown of the first five decades of the 20th century is reconstructed to be less enigmatic for people of African descent, and more visible for other mainstream Americans. Remarkably, she employed a uniquely crafted philosophy of interactional destiny for the world's “races” anchored in her brand of Christian evangelism. Bethune's uniquely early feminist worldview and strategies for inter-racial cooperation, different than the worldviews of some of her contemporaries, achieved much social capital and opened doors of opportunity for herself and countless others through a brief federal government position, and organized women's work before 1955. Since much of her meta-narrative was riddled with hagiography and myth, this study has fettered out some myths and eradicated some of the hagiography. The study combines primary sources, secondary sources, photo-ethnography, and hermeneutics to illuminate another pathway for future leadership students and organization developers to appropriate aspects of Bethune's 20th century leadership performance as their own. Unintended to merely applaud Dr. Bethune's leadership performance, this stud (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Music

This dissertation aims to explore and describe, in ethnographic terms, some of the principal formal and non-formal environments in which jazz music is learned today. By elucidating the broad aesthetic, stylistic, and social landscapes of present-day jazz pedagogy, it seeks to encourage the revitalization and reorientation of jazz education, and of the cultural spaces in which it takes place. Although formal learning environments have increasingly supported the activities of the jazz community, I argue that this development has also entailed a number of problems, notably a renewal of racial tensions spurred on by 1) the under-representation of non-white students and faculty, especially black Americans; 2) the widespread adoption of 'color-blind' methodologies in formal music-learning environments, which serve to perpetuate ambivalence or apathy in the addressing of racial problems; 3) a failure adequately to address cultural studies related to the black heritage of jazz music; and 4) the perpetuation of a narrow vision of jazz music that privileges certain jazz styles, neglects others, and fails to acknowledge the representative intersections between jazz and related forms of black music. The study seeks to answer two main questions: What is the nature of the twenty-first-century learning environment? Moreover, how do cultural and racial dynamics affect the ways in which jazz is taught and understood in formal and non-formal settings? My proposition is that teaching jazz as a part of a broad spectrum of black musical styles and cultural traditions, which I shall call the black musical continuum, provides solutions for the dearth of cultural competency and narrow vision of jazz found in many learning environments. Through a continuum theory, I seek to provide a framework for viewing, teaching, learning, and performing jazz that situates it within the larger socio-cultural context of black American music. I argue that such a reorientation toward African-American cu (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, African-American and African Studies

This thesis examines the complex sociocultural dynamics that surround the concept of jazz theory from two broad perspectives: formalized or academic jazz theory, which emerged as a result of the formal institutionalization of jazz in the academy, and organic or intrinsic jazz theory, which first arose from African American music-making practices. This dichotomy does not suggest that the majority of jazz community members exist at the extremes of either of these two poles. Contrarily, most musicians tend to occupy the grey area somewhere in between. The aim of this study was to shed light on the complex and elusive intersection between formalized and organic approaches to jazz theory. Through an analysis of informal, formal, and virtual (internet-based) jazz music-learning environments, the results offer a thick description of the way in which notions of "jazz theory" affected the social lives of musicians, fostered racialized jazz identities, defined community boundaries, and influenced music-making practices. The paper includes a variety of case studies, such as Miles Davis' experience studying music at Julliard, an analysis of the first methodological theory books published for jazz students and educators, online forums where jazz students discuss music theory, and ethnographic data related to modern day jazz theory that I collected from nonacademic and academic jazz learning environments. Two theory-related books examined included George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept and David Baker's Jazz Pedagogy: A Comprehensive Method of Jazz Education for Teacher and Student. In both, the cultural contexts in which the works were created and how many students and educators misinterpreted or omitted elements that reflect the tabooed subject of race were considered. The study also relied on original ethnographic content collected during a field study at a Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop, a racially charged debate between two Aebersold camp attendees, a meeting wi (open full item for complete abstract)

EdD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Education : Educational Foundations

This study examines the portrayal of Africa and its people in world history textbooks for junior high school students. As part of this examination, this study will review distorted and omitted information pertaining to African history and culture, the socio-political agendas promoted within these textbooks, as well as neglected African perspectives. A review of the various techniques used to conduct textbook analysis studies is also provided. One of the early textbook analysis studies on African American history, conducted by Marie E. Carpenter, revealed that stereotypes portraying Africans as inferior, backwards, traitorous, bloodthirsty savages have largely declined since the 1800's. The findings of the current study suggests that in world history textbooks published and used during the late 1980's and the 1990's, there is a serious problem of omitting pertinent information and a failure to include African perspectives on history and culture.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Womens Studies

Bringing together Black Feminist and post-structuralist perspectives, this dissertation examines how the public discourse of the African American Civil Rights movement has created specific subject-positions that African American women must write through and with, if they are to tell their remembrances of that historical moment. Through textual analysis and archival research, this dissertation performs a queer reading of the Civil Rights movement. Previous scholarship on African American autobiography has centered on analyzing race, gender, and the experience of being oppressed by the dominant culture. My project differs from previous scholarship because it explores the ways that hetero-normative and racialized surveillance influences African American constructions of the self.