A bit about me…
As a kid, I was often the only Black girl in my classrooms. Growing up as an “outsider within” my mostly white schools shaped my critical interest in how race, class, and gender stratify social life. I gained the tools to understand my experiences as an undergraduate at Spelman College, where I was introduced to intersectional feminism. After graduating from Spelman summa cum laude, I began my doctoral program in Sociology at the University of Southern California as a Provost Fellow, where I earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology with a graduate certificate in Gender Studies. I am also an alumna of the Black European Summer School, the International Decolonial Black Feminism School, a UNCF/Mellon-Mays Fellow, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and have spent a year as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.
Broadly, my academic research projects theorize bodies as mediums of culture, or the physical and symbolic form through which race, class, and gender hierarchies, social control, and social etiquette are played out. My past work on the sociology of sport and my dissertation project on Black beauty politics center the body to examine the complexity, multiplicity, and particularity of Black practices from an intersectional feminist perspective. My book on the natural hair movement among Black women will be released by NYU Press in October 2024.
In the corporate world, I have experience as a mixed methods researcher and strategy consultant. I currently work as a Staff Researcher on LinkedIn’s User Experience Research team and serve as a lead for our Inclusive Research Ethics working group, focusing the most sensitive experiences that can happen online. I collaborate with designers, engineers and product managers to inspire empathetic and elegant end-to-end experiences through 1:1 interviews, surveys, usability testing, and fieldwork with users. At ReD Associates, a boutique consultancy that uses ethnographic methods to answer clients' toughest business problems, I’ve worked alongside executives, designers, anthropologists, philosophers, and economists to understand the evolving core of human wants and needs.
My overarching goal is to inform the development of just, equitable, and human-centered political strategies, design, media, scholarship, and artwork that reflect the situated knowledges and needs of our society’s most vulnerable populations. In this pursuit, I recently co-founded a public sociology organization, CLC Collective. Our children’s books IntersectionAllies: We Make Room For All and Love without Bounds: An IntersectionAllies Book about Families have been featured by Google Talks, Lisa Ling, The New York Times WireCutter, Katie Couric, The Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and more.
When I'm not researching or writing, I enjoy hiking, reading novels, exploring new art mediums, and eating my way through new cities.
Let’s Connect!
I enjoy working with filmmakers, artists, entrepreneurs, and fellow academics. If you have an idea to share, please do not hesitate to reach out.