2021. Communication, Culture & Critique.
The 2010s saw the onset of the Black Travel Movement—an influx of travel companies aimed at a rising Black customer base, whose travel habits are redefining a traditionally White industry. This study interrogates how Black travel companies produce representations that create new possibilities for Blackness on a global scale. This article forwards the concept of differential spatial racialization to explicate how race and racial meanings change across spatial contexts.
Asexuality, Affect Aliens, and Digital Affect Cultures: Relationality with the Happy Objects of Sexual and Romantic Relationships
Forthcoming. Western Journal of Communication.
Situated within Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication (CIFC), this study leverages affect theory to understand how asexual and aromantic people construct relationalities within a sex and romance saturated society. A critical thematic analysis of Instagram accounts run by asexual and aromantic people reveals how they create community based on their alien affect to the “happy objects” (Ahmed, 2010) of sexual and romantic relationships.
2020. Communication Teacher.
Leveraging arts-based pedagogy, this interpersonal and family communication activity allows students to engage creatively with a concept of the instructor’s choosing through the creation of a collective poem. Each student contributes statements that the instructor forms into a poem, resulting in a collaborative artifact that engages students’ affective and cognitive understanding of the subject.
This autoethnographic research examines the legacy of Roberts Settlement, a mixed-race settlement in Indiana that became one of the largest rural communities of free people of color in the state before the 20th century. As a Roberts descendent, the researcher uses Black feminist thought and poetic inquiry to investigate the gendered and racial family narratives that constitute the genealogy of the Roberts family.
2019. Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
Co-authored with: Lulu Olaniyan, Duncan. C. Stewart, and Julia Berger.
This essay traces how social movements throughout the globe in 1968 heavily influenced the development, operations, and identity of cultural studies. Thus, 1968 remains a critical turning point for cultural studies and its goals. The essay questions how our contemporary moment might necessitate new pursuits in scholarly praxis, like the moment of 1968 called forth new directions in cultural studies.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Race and Communication
Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication
Critical Race Theory
Genetic Ancestry Testing and Race Science
Identity and Subjectivity
RESEARCH METHODS
Qualitative Methods
Interviews & Focus Groups
Textual & Discourse Analysis
Narrative Inquiry
Autoethnography
