Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Sociology (with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Black Studies)
University of California, Santa Barbara
2022

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
2018

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Sociology
Connecticut College
2015

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Philosophy
Connecticut College
2015

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Psychology
Connecticut College
2015

Principles of Ethnography (G)

Ethnographic Fieldwork (UG)

Principles of Criminal Justice (UG)

Race, Crime, & Justice (UG)

Policing the Black Diaspora (UG/G)

Abolition, Repair, & Justice (UG/G)

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) HBCU Faculty Fellow (2025-2026)

Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis

Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis (2nd Edition)

This new edition of Black Feminist Sociology offers revised and updated chapters on the history, contours, and prospects of the Black feminist tradition in sociology.

This volume offers new writings by established and emerging scholars working in a Black feminist sociological tradition that provide important attention to transnational Black feminist perspectives, Black feminist inspirations toward abolition and imagination, and Black feminist sociology in connection to other women of color feminisms. Additionally, this new edition incorporates further pedagogical enhancements, such as an instructor’s appendix that includes examples that map how to use the text in the classroom, questions to consider, and links to digital resources. The book overall centers Black feminist sociology (BFS) within the sociology canon and widens it to feature Black feminist sociologists both outside the US and the academy. Inspired by a BFS lens, the chapters are critical, personal, political, and oriented toward social justice. Key themes include the origins of BFS, expositions of BFS orientations to research that extend disciplinary norms, and contradictions of the pleasures and costs of such an approach both academically and personally. Authors explore their own sociological legacy of intellectual development to raise critical questions of intellectual thought and self-reflexivity.

The book highlights the dynamism of BFS so future generations of scholars can expand upon and beyond the book’s key themes. This new edition will be an essential and valuable resource for students and instructors in introductory and intermediate courses in sociology, social theory, race and ethnic studies, Black studies, feminist and womanist studies, and cultural studies.

Ethnographies of Race, Crime, and Justice

Ethnographies of Race, Crime, and Justice: Toward a Sociological Double-Consciousness

This review discusses contemporary developments in qualitative research on race, crime, and criminal justice, focusing on ethnographic studies of race and policing, criminal justice, prisons, and mass incarceration. These ethnographies inform us about the day-to-day contexts in which crime, law, and punishment are produced. They help to make visible structures of power that contribute to inequality, push for a more reflexive approach to ethnography, and sophisticate our understanding of culture. A methodological paradigm has emerged that informs the research process and helps us understand the root causes and consequences of some of the most pressing issues in the United States: race and racism in the justice system, police harassment, police violence, police–community relations, antiauthoritarian social movements, crime prevention, and reentry. This body of scholarship is collectively developing a more reflexive paradigm in ethnography, which we term the sociological double-consciousness approach.

“Colorblind” Cops and the Enactment of Spatial Racism in Routine Policing

“Other than the Projects, You Stay Professional”: “Colorblind” Cops and the Enactment of Spatial Racism in Routine Policing

In this article, we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western United States identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage routine encounters. We find that officers use membership categorization devices to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories (e.g., nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects), which, in turn, prefigure different orientations to action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public. Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it.

The Racial Politics of Place in Afro-Finnish Hip Hop

“We’re Not All Thugs in the East”: The Racial Politics of Place in Afro-Finnish Hip Hop

This chapter explores the discursive construction of East Helsinki as a racialized and classed space in the Finnish cultural imaginary through an analysis of Afro-Finnish hip hop. Based on a critical discursive analysis of four songs by the rapper Prinssi Jusuf and the duo Seksikäs-Suklaa & Dosdela, I examine how rappers from East Helsinki challenge and negotiate the stigma associated with the district via their music. Using Loïc Wacquant’s (2009) framework of territorial stigmatization, I show the ways in which these rappers deploy different discourses about East Helsinki that resist the stigmatization of East Helsinki, while also creating new discourses that transcend efforts to mitigate stigma. I argue that in addition to challenging the mainstream media-produced stereotypes about East Helsinki as a dilapidated and crime-ridden problem area, the rappers also “talk back” by producing counter-discourses about “the East” as a sphere of belonging, home and freedom, juxtaposed against broader experiences of exclusion. East Helsinki’s reputation as the home of immigrants and low-income residents is also claimed as a point of pride, as a source of collective identification and as a sphere of belonging.

Framing the Black Lives Matter Movement

Framing the Black Lives Matter Movement: An Analysis of Shifting News Coverage in 2014 and 2020

The police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd sparked a resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests throughout the summer of 2020, reminiscent of the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that occurred after several police killings in 2014 including the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Based on qualitative analysis of mainstream media coverage of the protests, this paper examines key themes in the discourse surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 and 2020. Our findings highlight the ways in which mainstream news sources situate the Black Lives Matter protests within a broader history of Black uprisings. We also emphasize the erasure of violence against Black women in mainstream media depictions of the BLM movement, as well as the erasure of Black women’s leadership in the movement.

Notes on Collective Care as Black Feminist Praxis

Notes on Collective Care as Black Feminist Praxis Within, Outside, and Against the Academic Industrial Machine

In this collaborative meditation, understandings and practices of academic living in the Nordics as Afro-Nordic feminists are enacted through an explorative methodology of engaging and re-imagining forms for knowledge production through the lens of Black feminist theorizations. In particular, we rehearse practices of collective care through a form of collective note keeping, a practice which is in kinship with Christina Sharpe's concept of notes (2023). In practicing this collective note keeping, we attempt to make explicit some of the conditions, contexts, and practices which make up the antiblack climate (Sharpe, 2016) of academia, as well as the Black feminist values and practices which help us weather these conditions. In our notes, we offer a generative critique of not only the conditions which structure the experiences of African and Black feminists in Nordic academia, but also the often seemingly progressive efforts which purport to make academia a more inclusive space. Grounded in our specific, overlapping yet different positions, experiences, and relations to academia, we also explore the ways in which our collective facilitates experimentation with alternative ways of being, relating, and co-creating knowledge which center Black feminist ethics of care, collaboration, and shared memory. We share these notes reflecting on our work together to illustrate the possibilities of imagining and creating fugitive spaces of collective care within, outside, and against the academic industrial machine.

Negotiating Race, Place, and Nation in Afro-Finnish Hip Hop

"Too Dark to Support the Lions, But Light Enough for the Frontlines”: Negotiating Race, Place, and Nation in Afro-Finnish Hip Hop

In this article, I examine cultural production as an avenue for mapping African diasporic identities and racialised experiences in Finland. Hip hop culture has long acted as a lingua franca for the African diaspora and has been central in the development of collective identities among second-generation European youth of colour. Prior to the 2010s, the landscape of Finnish hip hop was largely white with little engagement with race or hip hop’s roots as a Black American cultural form. This status quo was disrupted by the rise of Afro-Finnish rappers. Since gaining mainstream visibility, they have catapulted into the national consciousness with music that reclaims the language of racial and ethnic identities, interrogates assumptions about national belonging, and represents the lived experiences of first-generation Black/AfroFinnish men. Approaching hip hop as a resource for resisting normative Whiteness and carving out space for Black/African diasporic collectivities in the Finnish cultural and political imaginary, I show how AfroFinnish rappers articulate and navigate Blackness in relation to identity, racism, and national belonging in Finland. In doing so, I emphasise the tensions between racial, ethnic, and cultural hybridity, on the one hand, and the rigidity of Finnish Whiteness and national exclusion, on the other.

Meditations on Liminality and Blackness in Afro-Finish Hip-Hip and R&B

From “Something in Between” to “Everything All at Once": Meditations on Liminality and Blackness in Afro-Finish Hip-Hip and R&B

Since its global spread in the 1980s, hip-hop has been a crucial cultural sphere in which Europeans of color have engaged the experiences of race and racism, gender, and national belonging, with hip-hop music and culture often considered to function as the cultural lingua franca of the African diaspora. Given the continued dominance of Nordic exceptionalism and formal color-blindness in both the Finnish national imaginary and public discourses, hip-hop emerges as an important site for examining the production of counter-discourses and -narratives by Finns of color, and Afro-Finns in particular. This article approaches Afro-Finnish hip-hop as an alternative archive of Afro-Finnish experience and thought. It centers three works by the Afro-Finnish R&B singer Rosa Coste and Afro-Finnish rapper Yeboyah to examine
articulations of liminality in relation to Blackness, mixedness, and Finnishness. Exploring the multiple readings of liminality discernible across these works, the article shows that they offer meaningful meditations on Afro-Finnish identity and experience. In raising the multiple forms of liminality that shape the Afro-Finnish experience, these works also raise questions about the potentials and limitations of multiraciality as a category of analysis in the Finnish context.

Writing Letters as Counter-Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice

Writing Letters as Counter-Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice

Can counter-archiving be a form of social care? This essay is a dialogue on this topic among four Afro-Nordic feminists writing to each other in the form of letters over a five-month period during 2021. Using an explorative and intuitive practice informed by Black feminist thought, the authors dive into the archives of their families and of the communities that they relate to and are part of as a way to communicate how and why they approach counter-archiving. Black diasporic contributions to Nordic histories are widely erased, silenced, and forgotten, both in the past and present, which is why the authors write them into being. The aim of the essay is to communicate some of the specificities of living and negotiating a Black feminist life in the Nordics. The authors also want to inscribe the Nordics into the Black European archive. The following themes are used to organize the dialogue: 1) positionalities and contexts; 2) Multigenerational legacies: silences, gifts, stories, 3) Counter-Archiving (as) mobilization, transformation, refusal, 4) Imagining otherwise: letter writing as a practice of care. Finally, we argue that counter-archiving through letter-writing dialogue can be a pleasurable, caring, and collective form of knowledge creation that transgresses traditional academic forms.