SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

This article examines how Black justice involved mothers navigate the enduring unfreedom of post-imprisonment life. Drawing upon the analytical framework of Black Feminist Criminology (BFC), this paper argues that centering women’s narratives of unfreedom provides a context for understanding and critiquing systemic and structural oppression. Interviews with thirty-three Black formerly incarcerated mothers from two transitional organizations in New York and Massachusetts reveals how women a) Identify instances of structural oppression at the hands of the legal system and the labor market and b) Deploy individual responses that reframe their marginal status by subverting expectations of their roles as mothers and as participants within transitional organizations. Substantively, this study holds implications for identifying how unfreedom persists and is concretized through institutions that regulate women’s post-imprisonment journeys. Theoretically, this paper addresses how a Black women-centered framework, such as BFC, captures the complex and intersectional nature of (un)freedom in marginalized women’s lives.

In this op-ed,  I connect the tragedy in Buffalo to generational loss.

Maternal incarceration is but a phase for the people who experience it. It doesn’t define them. 

This paper examines how positive social media representations of aging Black female bodies problematize existing notions of aging as an almost uniformly negative phenomenon. Using the social media platform Tumblr, this study reveals that the framing of age, race, and gender is both complex and nuanced. Images which challenge deeply set historical notions of female beauty include those of celebrities, noncelebrities and comparisons between aging Black women and historically standardized representations of physical attractiveness. Findings illustrate that managing impressions vis-à-vis social media is a complex, sometimes messy performance in which images both challenge and substantiate problematic assumptions. Some images that framed Black women positively but did so at the expense of other women. This paper adds to the body of work that explores how social media is used as a vehicle for counter narrative messaging. These findings offer additional insight into how impression management theory is used to analyze social media content. 

Drawing on 150 in-depth interviews with African American male and female youth who have spent much of their lives in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, we explore the structural and cultural underpinnings of the elevated rate of unplanned childbearing among disadvantaged youth. We find that gender asymmetry in perceived opportunity costs, shared social meanings associated with condom use, and perceptions of health risk associated with hormonal and other female forms of birth control such as intrauterine devices—perceptions that may be rooted in a generalized distrust of the medical establishment—are promising explanations not usually considered in the literature on unintended fertility. These findings offer additional insight into how disadvantaged youth calculate the opportunity costs of childbearing and raise additional considerations for policies surrounding family planning and reproduction in the context of urban poverty. 

From Ferguson to Chicago, New York City to Cleveland, the signature question community residents, academicians and those charged with serving and protecting much grapple with in 2016 is not unlike the question once raised by Dr. Martin Luther King: Where do we go from here?  (King 2010). In this paper I hope to examine one element of this question by de-constructing the consensus building process between law enforcement and community members in the city of Boston. Using a theoretical framework which outlines the role of deliberation and agreement, this article examines how law enforcement and community members negotiate competing notions of justice.

In this essay I describe the importance of "hot moments" within the classroom and how to effectively teaching challenging topics.  

In this paper I examine how the Black Church, as a central institution within the black community, possesses the resources, both spiritual and sociological, to help young black men negotiate the tenuous position they hold in U.S. Society. In outlining a framework I examine three areas ripe for future theoretical and empirical attention: 1) An examination of how masculinities have historically been defined within U.S. black churches and the extent to which this influenced contemporary conversations around masculinity and race 2) The role of the Black Church in organizing social protest movements and key ideological elements that affirmed and encouraged black men 3) The relationship between of the leadership model demonstrated by black male leadership within the Black Church and the social needs of young black males in contemporary U.S. society.