Current Research Projects
Cohorts 24-26 | 2024-2028
Research Title: The Clearing: Nature Play as Black Liberation Methodology
Research Keywords: Black ecologies, nature-centered play, liberation pedagogies, Black childhood studies, ecowomanism, abolitionist imaginary, decolonial studies, ethnography, education studies, racial colonial capitalism
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kristin Phillips
Research Title: In God’s Hands: An Exploration of Faith as Protection and Protest in the Black Church
Research Keywords: Black religion, cultural anthropology, neuroscience, faith and resistance, Black church traditions
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Devaka Premawardhana
Research Title: Reclamation and Empowerment: Black Women's Multiple Religious Allegiances to Ifá, Conjure, and Christianity
Research Keywords: Africana religions, Black Feminist Thought, ethnography, spirituality and healing, religious syncretism
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kyrah Malika Daniels
Research Title: Social Conservatism, Religion, and the Nativist State: Latinos and White Christian Nationalism
Research Keywords: Latinx Studies, religion, politics, Christian nationalism, social conservatism, race, immigration
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Devaka Premawardhana
Research Topic: Analyzing and understanding how Latinx communities of liminal and undocumented legal status in North Carolina recognize, react to, and respond to moments of environmental injustice and systems of slow violence.
Research Keywords: Environmental justice, Latinx Studies, immigration, the American South, literature, social change
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Geovani Ramirez
Research Title: Exploiting Blackness
Research Keywords: African American culture; Chicago, Illinois; film and media
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Research Title: Know Thyself: Divinities, Cosmologies, and Genealogies of the Ancient Near East Recontextualized in Black New Religious Movements
Research Keywords: Divinity, Black New Religious Movements, Black Hebrew Israelism, Ausar Auset Society, spiritual practices
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Dianne Stewart
Research Title: Earth, Winds, and Fires: An Exploration of Environmental Hazards' Disproportionate Impact on Black American Communities' Cultural Actualization
Research Keywords: Environmental degradation; climate racism; cultural actualization; Houston, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; The Bronx, New York City, New York
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jola Ajibade
Research Title: Against the Grain: Ideological and Spiritual Contours of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, 1967-Present
Research Keywords: Black farmers, labor, food sovereignty, structural violence, Indigenous frameworks
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Thomas Rogers
Research Title: The Effects of Surveillance Capitalism on Sociopolitical Imagination
Research Keywords: Social imagination, culture, identity, mass surveillance, capitalism
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Calvin Warren