My dissertation examines how ideas rooted in Black nationalism resurface and evolve within the Black Lives Matter era, tracing their spread through digital media, cultural expression, and activist work. I'm interested in how nationalist frameworks shape Black political identification and participation in contemporary U.S. politics, and how platforms like TikTok become sites where the boundaries of Blackness itself are negotiated, performed, and contested.
Research Interests
Black political thought & nationalism · Identity politics · Digital media & political culture · Race, coalition, and cross-racial solidarity · Environmental justice
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Social media is a valuable tool that enables Black individuals to contest their racialized experiences and engage in counterpublic discourse. Importantly, this opens up cultural property and closed conversations to out-group visibility and appropriation. With this in mind, I ask: how do Black social media users engage in boundary work on TikTok? I create a typology of boundary enforcement on the platform, identifying nine video subtypes, and analyze each subtype using Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis. The findings suggest that Black TikTok users employ various discursive strategies to maintain group boundaries. This study explores how new technologies may impact racialized experiences and identity formation.
Read the article →Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics
This paper explores whether attitudes toward ethnic nationalism among Black and Asian Americans influence attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter Movement. Acceptance of a nationalist ideology typically makes an individual animus towards outgroups. Moreover, ethnic/Black nationalism is known to flare in times of perceived intense oppression. Given current racial tensions in the United States, we are interested in examining factors that may help facilitate alliance-building between Black and Asian Americans, two nonwhite groups that exist on different planks of the U.S. racial hierarchy. We begin by recounting historical and contemporary instances of Afro-Asian solidarity and conflict. This is followed by a review of past theoretical articulation and empirical research on nationalist ideology within each community. We develop a set of group-specific indicators of ethnic nationalism for Black and Asian Americans from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. Our results show clear evidence that being sympathetic to ethnic nationalism can unite rather than divide the two racialized communities in their attitudes toward present-day projects such as the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Read the article →LSE US Politics and Policy Blog
A public-facing companion to the JREP article, exploring how ethnic nationalism connects to Black Lives Matter support among Black and Asian Americans in ways that challenge the narrative of Black-Asian conflict, highlighting historical solidarity against oppression instead.
Read the post →Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is scaling rapidly in the United States, yet no study has examined how the federal permitting process governing these projects performs against environmental justice standards. Drawing on environmental justice scholarship, we offer a holistic theory in which procedural, recognition, distributive, and restorative justice are mutually constitutive, and operationalize the four tenets into twelve evaluative criteria. We scrutinize ten Class VI injection well projects with completed public comment periods, using text-as-data analysis of public comments, Environmental Protection Agency response-to-comments documents, permit redaction patterns, and county-level environmental burden indicators. We find that the process conflicts with environmental justice on all four tenets. Over a third of public concerns are dismissed as outside the scope of the permitting decision and receive no response, an exclusion that falls hardest on commenters in environmentally burdened, majority-minority counties. No federal mechanism requires acknowledgment of cumulative burdens or corrective action, and these early governance choices risk becoming locked in as CCS scales.
Principal Investigator: Dr. Gaye Theresa Johnson. Currently assisting with research on the structural constraints to building University of California student housing and its impact on student well-being and student success.
Principal Investigator: Dr. AJ Rice. Project: Tracing the Takeover: Education Reform and the Politics of Racialization.