Community Matters

I spent ten years working as a civil servant and in public schools prior to becoming a professor. That experience informs a principle of Black Studies that has guided my work in academia: intellectual thought and community engagement are twin pillars of the discipline. This means I am invested in producing scholarship that is public facing and community engaged. It also means I am committed to praxis as both a pedagogical tool and for dictating the way I exist within society and the university.

As the Director of the Department of African American and African Studies Community Extension Center (CEC), I was responsible for rebuilding community-based educational programming and research at a 7,000 square foot building located off-campus in a historically African American neighborhood. Community engagement has been the most rewarding experience of my academic career, and I take pride in the highly collaborative and cross-disciplinary programs and research I spearheaded at the CEC, including serving as consultant on a College of Nursing grant studying African American women and ketogenic diets; hiring faculty and creative practice instructors to offer free community education courses on topics like negotiation, screen writing, and a 1619 community dance performance; appointing an inaugural Community Engaged Faculty Fellow who conducted research on soil toxicity in the CEC’s zip code; and collaborating with the Math Education outreach team, the James Cancer Center, and Wexner Medical Center mobile health unit. In these roles, I worked with deans, faculty, and staff in Ohio State’s sixteen colleges, the Office of Student Life, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the University Library. I also worked with community collaborators, social services agencies, Columbus City Council members, and Columbus Foundation officers.

As a board member for the Wexner Center for the Arts Shumate African American Outreach and Engagement Council, I provide expertise and insight on urban community engagement in the arts. Membership on this Council has offered opportunities to organize artist visits at local secondary schools and also for me to offer a multisensory gallery talk and curate a playlist for the Mickalene Thomas exhibition I Can’t See You Without Me.

I am completing a digital project that will be linked here summer 2023. Developed with my historian colleague Eric Herschthal and an app development team at Ohio State University, “Beyond Data: Centering Black Mother’s Voices on Pregnancy and Childbirth,” is a website that hosts a collection of oral histories from African American women in Central Ohio who share stories about their experiences with healthcare providers from conception through postpartum. I am also the executive producer with filmmaker Celia C. Peters (Director and Producer) and Allen S. Coleman (Producer) of Shutdown, a documentary feature on racial unrest at Linden-McKinley High School in Columbus, Ohio that shut it down in May 1971. WCMH-NBC4 News Anchor Kerry Charles did a feature on the documentary for Black History Month.