Empowering Change
Amplifying Voices
Transforming Lives
My professional dossier reflects almost two decades of experience teaching, researching, and serving as a champion for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), social justice, and institutional equity and reform. As a forward-thinking diversity professional, I have enjoyed a broad career helping individuals, organizations, and corporate networks expand the capabilities of their organization and develop company-wide DEI initiatives, programs, and partnerships. My portfolio of clients includes academic institutions, non-profit organizations, Fortune 500 companies, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), Diversity Committees (advisory and ad hoc), mid-level managers, C-Suite leaders, and other diversity professionals.
Scholar
I specialize in race and identity formation with a particular emphasis on transnational conceptions of Blackness, decolonial feminist politics (Afro-Feminism), theories of the African Diaspora, and anti-racist social justice. My research has been vital to the development of a relatively new subdiscipline of philosophy – the Critical Philosophy of Race – that endeavors to find new ways of approaching questions of race/racism and diversity. In 2014 I pivoted my research from a focus on how race functions within Black and Brown communities in the U.S. to understanding racism as a global phenomenon and performing intersectional analyses of race and gender outside of the U.S. context. I am part of a variety of international associations and networks that bring together various scholars and practitioners to exchange ideas and best practices. These types of transcontinental partnerships are important for my research and for the work I do as a diversity practitioner. This scholar-educator-practitioner model reinforces the role of academics in the development of DEIB practices and interventions.
Ph.D. and MA in Philosophy
C-Suite and Board Service
18 years in the education sector
12 years of experience creating innovative & diverse learning tools
10 years of experience in public programming
Skilled presenter, speaker, and facilitator
Skilled in strategic management and cross-functional team dynamics
Certified Higher Education Professional (CHEP)
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion in the Workplace Certification
Managing Real World Projects Certification
Highlights
Educator
I have taught courses at Walker Mill Middle School, Philadelphia Futures, the University of Memphis, Penn State University, Prince George’s Community College, and West Chester University, I have the requisite experience interacting with students and youth of varying socioeconomic, cultural, and academic backgrounds in a classroom environment. My time in the classroom has given me experience discussing racism, queer antagonism, feminism and xenophobia as educational, cultural and social issues. It has also forced me to think seriously about how students/youth are impacted by their identities, formulate student-centered programs on race and identity formation, and cater my discussions of self-identity to individual experiences as well as the broader University community, inspiring campus involvement and civic engagement. My classroom and office have always served as a place of refuge for my students who express feelings of marginalization and isolation on campus. And because of the challenges I have faced as a Black-woman-philosopher in academia, I have a very unique insight into the barriers to education and capacity development that many minority students face and have helped them circumnavigate their college and career decisions. Outside of strengthening their critical thinking capacities, my pride as an educator has been the mentorship and support I provide to my students in every aspect of their collegiate careers.
Practitioner
I decided to transition out of academia and pursue DEI fulltime out of a need to more directly be involved in the practical application of the critical theories I had been developing. Since then, my work sits at the intersection of DEIB and People Management. For the past seven years, my job has been to strategize, problem solve, critically analyze, synthesize information, build cross-departmental coalitions, create educational tools, support employee and student affinity groups, and create new interventions to meet the people and culture challenges in an organization. I am typically brought into organizations who are at the beginning stages of their DEI journey to diagnose the organizational culture, gauge the community’s diversity appetite for change, facilitate difficult conversations, and lead implementation efforts across teams and departments. Many of the organizations I have worked with did not have a clear vision of the type of organization they wanted to become (i.e., a comprehensive theory of change). I had to create the commitments and galvanize the internal community -- from the Board to contributing staff -- to embrace the recommended system changes and revitalize the organizational culture.
Publications
DEI in the Workplace
Theories of the African Diaspora
Critical Philosophy of Race
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"The pandemic changed the way we live and work dramatically in many ways. Almost overnight, full-time teleworking became common as companies and employees adapted quickly to the constraints of repeated lockdowns. The number of Americans primarily working from home more than tripled between 2019 and 2021, according to the Census Bureau. Now that things are getting back to normal, some firms, such as Twitter and Goldman Sachs, have made it clear that they want employees back in the office, but many others appear happy to have a fully remote or hybrid workforce. Americans are embracing flexible work – and they want more of it, according to a report from McKinsey, a global management consulting company. As the trend gathers pace, offering teleworking has been hailed by some as a way that companies can boost their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives."
“Traveling Elsewheres: Afropolitanism, Americanah, and the Illocution of Travel” Critical Philosophy of Race. Vol. 7, No. 2 (2019) pp. 289-305
This paper is an attempt to excavate one of the most labyrinthine occurrences in immigrant life – the decision to return “home” – through an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah. This paper seeks to challenge the claim that returning to Africa is counterintuitive and only departure from the Continent is desirable, and in so doing it attempts to displace the centrality of America as the necessary backdrop of subjective life, especially immigrant life. Offering “Americanah” as a counterweight to the portmanteau “Afropolitanism” this analysis distinguishes these two popular (an contemporary) modes of “being African in the world” and ways of conceiving “Africanness” in the world today by exploring the link between the migration away from and to Africa. Ifemelu’s story is an interesting counterweight to Afropolitanism because of the very fact that she returns home. Her return opens up two questions in the context of this analysis: (1) What does the logic travel offer to Ifemelu’s racial identity as she comes to understand herself in two geospatial temporalities? (2) What does the language of ‘home’, as contrasted to the discomfort of travel, contribute to her ontological understandings?
https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2440/2389
The world (especially the philosophical world) has not been the same since W.E.B. Du Bois raised the important question, “what, then, is a race?” and put forth his first and most systematic definition of race in “The Conservation of Races” (1897). This paper returns our philosophical gaze back to Du Bois’s address to the American Negro Academy (“The Conservation of Races”) and offers a close and careful reading of the text that will reanimate Du Bois’ sociohistorical definition of race as the world celebrates the 150th anniversary of
his birth.
Research in Progress
Theories of the African Diaspora
Critical Philosophy of Race
“Race Doesn’t Really Work Here: Theorizing Transnational Conceptions of Blackness in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah”
Near the end of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah, the main character, Ifemelu, is asked whether she continued writing her very successful blog on race since returning to Nigeria. Her response is the central point of analysis in this paper. Ifemelu states that, “Race doesn’t really work here. I feel like I got off the plane in Lagos and stopped being black.” This paper endeavors to interrogate the logic of “racelessness” involved in Ifemelu’s statement, in order to question whether the physical presence of her body in Nigeria – as a historical artifact and a geospatial location – is able to achieve the scathing universality Ifemelu’s words engender. Thus, this paper displaces the centrality of the US and questions whether a romanticized longing for home is the necessary backdrop of subjective life (especially African Diasporic life) and argues, against Adichie, that Nigeria is a site of critical engagement with the concept of race. The final work this analysis performs is to provide a new way to engage the African Diaspora in race discourse and to bring African fiction like Americanah into the highly theoretical space that is Critical Philosophy of Race, allowing both to make a more robust contribution to the fields of African Studies
and Transnational Blackness Studies.
“Revenge of the African Booty Scratcher”
This paper offers some insights into the complex relationship between African and African-Americans in response to the February 2018 release of Marvel’s Black Panther movie. I tease out the affective quality of Blackness and associated sentiments of Black pride/solidarity Black Panther invokes through the hashtag #WakandaForever, while simultaneously interrogating representations of Africanity that feed into aspirational views of Blackness. In this way, this paper calls out the hypocrisy in both Africans and African-Americans as a way to expose their complicity in anti-Black violence and Black antagonism.
Contact
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