Research Bites

About

Research Bites is a speaker series that aims to build community between the center's faculty affiliates and staff members in order to improve how we support and amplify one another's work. 

If you are interested in attending, please join our staff listserv for announcements of speakers and other opportunities. 

Persons with disabilities who need assistance should contact Tierra Kilpatrick 72-hours in advance at kilpatr3@uchicago.edu.

 

Upcoming Conversations

Maya Singhal - 4/24/24

Maya Singhal is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Instructor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. They received their PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. Maya's work is broadly about how people navigate violence across generations. Their current book project is an ethnographic and historical study of community defense and its challenges for African American and Chinese American populations primarily in Lower Manhattan from the 1960s to the present. 

Register here!

Gina Fedock - 5/15/24

Gina Fedock is an Associate Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. Her research agenda builds on scholarship that regards the criminal legal system as embodying forms of gendered and racialized social control. Across this work, she highlights the role of institutional and system-related sources of suffering for women, and points to new directions, especially for the field of social work, regarding needed multi-level interventions to improve women’s mental health and wellbeing. One of her current studies uses a reproductive justice framework to examine how incarcerated women employ strategies of resistance to navigate dehumanizing barriers to parenting and reclaim their right to parent with dignity.

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Kyshia Henderson - 6/5/24

Kyshia Henderson is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychology Department. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Virginia. She is a social psychologist whose primary interest lies in examining how White Americans justify and promote racism. Specifically, her work has examined how White Americans ignore, dismiss, and distort the history of racism in ways that promote white supremacy.

Register here!

 

 

Past Conversations

Lisa Moore and C. Nell Crittenden - 03/20/24 - Watch here!

Lisa Moore is is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Master of Arts in Social Work and Social Welfare Program at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. She has extensive teaching and administrative experience. Her current research includes two different projects. The first is the "Intersections of race, racism, and psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theories." Her second research project is "Exploring relationships in intentional housing communities in Minneapolis, MN and Chicago, IL."

C. Nell Crittenden is is a Lecturer at the University of Chicago, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, where she teaches “Black Women Work: The Labor of Black Women in Communities, Families, and Institutions.” Nell’s work as an anti-oppressive researcher and educator includes leading comparative studies on culturally responsive & trauma-informed pedagogy in higher ed classrooms and expanding intersectional feminist frames to inform domestic violence research advocacy agendas.

Adrienne Brown - 02/21/24

Adrienne Brown specializes in American and African American cultural production in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the history of perception as shaped by the built environment. Her teaching and research interests include critical race studies, architecture and urban studies, American studies, Modernism, postmodernism, the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, popular culture, visual culture, and sound studies. She's also taught in the Chicago studies program here at U of C. Learn more about her here.

Tina Post - 01/31/24

Tina Post's work is preoccupied with racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) the ways that black Americans perform racial identity. What modes of embodiment assert belonging or dis-belonging, and how? When do racialized subjects confirm and when do they subvert the expectations of their identitarian positions, and to what end?How do other factors of embodiment (gender, dis/ability, hybridity, and so forth) color these performances? Learn more about her here.

Allyson Field - 12/6/23

Allyson Nadia Field’s scholarship contributes to evolving areas of study that investigate the functioning of race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts surrounding cinema. Her primary research interest is in African American film and is unified by two broad theoretical inquiries: how film and visual media shape perceptions of race and ethnicity, and how these media have been and can be mobilized to perpetuate—or challenge—social inequities. Learn more about her here.

Rashauna Johnson - 10/11/23

Johnson is a historian of the 19th Century African diaspora with an emphasis on slavery and emancipation in the U.S. South and Atlantic world. Her work explores the limits and possibilities of archival histories of enslaved and freed people and the worlds in which they labored and lived. Learn more about her here.


C. Riley Snorton - 10/13/21 (Watch here)
C. Riley Snorton is the Interim Faculty Director of the CSRPC. He is also a Professor of English Language and Literature, jointly appointed in the department and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies, at the University of Chicago. Snorton is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee. Snorton is also the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020). Read more about Dr. Snorton here. 


Cathy J. Cohen and Jonathan Lykes - 11/10/21 (Watch here)
Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She formerly served in numerous administrative positions, including chair of the Department of Political Science, director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and deputy provost for Graduate Education at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press) and Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press).  She is also co-editor of the anthology Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader(NYU Press) with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto. Her articles have been published in numerous journals and edited volumes including the American Political Science Review, NOMOS, GLQ, Social Text, and the DuBois Review. Cohen created and oversees two major research and public-facing projects: the GenForward Survey and the Black Youth Project. She is the recipient of numerous awards, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-editor with Frederick Harris of a book series at Oxford University Press entitled “Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities.” Read more about Professor Cohen here. 

Jonathan Lykes - Founder/Executive Director, Liberation House - is a Black queer artist, activist and academic. His interdisciplinary approach to art, activism and anti-oppression work, merges policy change, artistic expression and activism. Combining these forms of social transformation—and harnessing their synergy—Jonathan works to create awareness, promote personal healing, surmount institutional barriers and generate systemic change. Jonathan’s current position as Founder/Executive Director of Liberation House merges his multidisciplinary artistic background with public policy reform, community engagement and systems change work to teach liberation praxis by pushing the revolutionary edge of radical transformative movement work. Lykes is also the Director of Policy and Programs for Black Youth Project/GenForward Survey. Lykes is also a founding member of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), a movement of young adults using a Black Queer Feminist lens to advocate for community and institutional change. Through BYP100, Jonathan curated a freedom song and chant album, The Black Joy Experience, helping to teach holistic energy through the Black radical tradition. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, where he also received his master’s degree from the School for Social Service Administration. For more info visit: LiberationHouse.org


Honey Crawford - 12/8/21 (Watch here)
Honey Crawford is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in TAPS at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include global feminisms, critical race theory, public spectacle, and protest. She specializes in Afro Brazilian cultural performance as both a scholar and practitioner, exploring intersections between ritual performance and self-making through a repertoire that includes carnival, media activism, radical theatre, and the performance of everyday life. She earned her PhD in theatre studies from Cornell University in 2017 where she was also a New York Public Humanities Fellow. Read more about Dr. Crawford here. 


Robert Vargas - 1/24/22 (View slides here)
Professor Vargas is a social scientist and data artist interested in research on cities, law, and race, especially through a spatial lens. His writing, art works, and teaching focus on identifying and describing the forces shaping the conditions of communities. To date, the bulk of his work has focused on violent crime and health care. His multi award-winning book "Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio" brought a political analysis to the study of urban violence by showing how ward redistricting shapes levels of block-level violence in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. He has also published in a variety of journals such as Social Problems, Criminology, and the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. His forthcoming book "Uninsured in Chicago: How the Social Safety Net Leaves Latinos Behind" (March 2022 with NYU Press) is a longitudinal and intersectional ethnography of uninsured Chicagoans' experiences with the Affordable Care Act. Read more about Professor Vargas here.


Eve Ewing - 2/2/22
Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, and most recently a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series as well as Marvel Team-Up and Champions. Ewing is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues. Currently she is working on her next book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, which will be published by One World. Read more about Dr. Ewing here.


Sophia Azeb - 3/9/22 (Watch here)
Sophia's research engages how Blackness and Black identity is variously translated, mobilized, and circulated by African American, African, and Afro-Arab cultural figures in North Africa and Europe in the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in how variable and contested articulations and translations of Blackness and Black identity from across the Atlantic, Sahara, and Mediterranean are imagined, lived, and debated in Anglophone, Francophone, and Arabophone cultural spheres –primarily literature, music, and African cultural festivals -before and during the Cold War and Non-Aligned era. In her current book project, Another Country: Constellations of Blackness in Afro-Arab Cultural Expression, she reads canonical texts on Blackness, pan-African, and pan-Arab identity by such figures as Claude McKay, Youssef el-Sebai, Frantz Fanon, and Shirley and David Graham Du Bois alongside heretofore untranslated or mistranslated cultural archives thatreveal the extent to which conceptions of Arabness and Blackness have long been entangled in the cultural and political constellations of the African diaspora. Read more about Sophia here.

Thomas Fisher, Isaiah Selkridge, and Heather Renfro - 5/20/22 (Watch here) 
Thomas Fisher is a board-certified emergency medicine physician from Chicago. He has worked to improve health care as an academic, health insurance executive, and White House Fellow in the Obama administration. His path includes training as Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar, being honored as a Crain’s Chicago Business 40 under 40, and inclusion in the Aspen Institute’s Health Innovators Fellowship. He is an epicure and a runner, and for the past twenty years, he has worked in the emergency department at the University of Chicago, serving the same South Side community where he was raised.

Isaiah Selkridge is a rising third-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Isaiah was born and raised in The Bronx, NY. Isaiah identifies as an Afro-Caribbean and African American male. Isaiah earned his BA in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. He then went on to work as a Technical Specialist at Apple Inc. and as a Senior Research Coordinator at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute. Isaiah has over 10 peer-reviewed publications. Isaiah served as the Co-President of the Student National Medical Association, the nation’s largest organization for Underrepresented Minorities in Medicine. He was also co-director of HPREP, a program run by medical students catered to high school students interested in healthcare as a career.
In addition, Isaiah sat on the board for one of Pritzker’s 5 free clinics, and currently sits on the Community Initiatives Committee for the UChicago Grad Council. His career interests include Orthopedic Surgery, Sports Medicine, opening his own free clinics, a fashion podcast, and opening his own school. His research interests include addressing and reducing gun violence in underserved communities, mental health in the Black community, and sports medicine.

Heather Renfro is currently a PGY-2 in Emergency Medicine at the wonderful University of Chicago. She is the co-president of our Housestaff Diversity Committee and the Resident Director of EMS. I enjoy creating spaces where like-minded individuals can fellowship, care-free, especially in today’s climate. She is a member of the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine where she is a national committee member of the “Equity and Inclusion” and “Fellowship Approval” committees. She is also currently an At-Large Board Member of AAEM/RSA. In her free time, She volunteers through the University of Chicago’s MedCeep program and teaches sessions on “Emergency Preparedness and Stop the Bleed Training”. She plans to obtain a fellowship in EMS after residency, where she will continue emergency preparedness training and ultimately become a medical director of EMS. She is a vegan, a dancer, and a food enthusiast; catch her on Yelp for her reviews of all of your favorite restaurants!


Gina E. Miranda Samuels - 2/1/23 (Watch here)
Join us for a Research Bite with Gina E. Miranda Samuels, CSRPC Faculty Director and Professor at Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. 
Gina Miranda Samuels is a Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. She explores the experiences of youth and young adults who have histories of displacement through foster care, transracial adoption, or home loss.  Her work has been used in public testimony to advance changes in policy for youth homelessness and for young people aging out of foster care, and was named among the top 14 most impactful African American social work scholars in the Unites States. Dr. Miranda Samuels brings her own lived expertise as a person who was adopted through foster care as an infant, and her practice experiences as a social worker in settings including juvenile probation, child welfare, post-adoption training, and school social work. Read more about Professor Samuels and her work here. 


Ryan Jobson - 3/1/23, 12pm (Watch here)
Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD in Anthropology and African American Studies from Yale University in 2017. His research is broadly preoccupied with questions of extractive fossil fuels, postcolonial sovereignty, climate, and political futures in the Caribbean. His first book manuscript, The Petro-State Masquerade, is a historical ethnography of the oil and gas development and postcolonial state building in Trinidad and Tobago. Jobson is also the guest editor of a special issue of Small Axe, “States of Crisis: Disaster, Recovery and Possibility in the Caribbean,” published in July 2020. His writing is featured in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Small Axe.

Damon Jones - 4/19/23, 12pm (Watch here) 
Professor Damon Jones conducts research at the intersection of three fields: public finance, household finance, and labor economics. Assoc. Prof. Jones has researched topics that include inequality, household financial decision-making, and racial equity, touches on policies such as income tax, the social safety net, social security, retirement and retirement savings, the interaction between employer-provided benefits and labor market outcomes, and economic inequality across racial lines. More recently, he has conducted research on workplace wellness programs, universal basic income, and racial differences in financial outcomes. At Harris, Assoc. Prof. Jones currently teaches a course on public finance and public policy, a course in advanced microeconomics, and a practicum on tax policy and household finance.

 


Dr. Doriane Miller - 5/3/23, 12pm (Watch here)
A general internist, Doriane Miller, MD, has been providing care to under-served minority populations for more than 20 years. In addition to her role as a primary care physician, she has a special interest in behavioral health.
Under her leadership, physicians, educators and community members work to improve population health outcomes for residents on the South Side of Chicago through community-engaged research, demonstration and service models.
Dr. Miller's research focuses on the intersection of health disparities and race. She has served as the project director for several studies designed to augment care by promoting collaboration among physicians, patients and families. Dr. Miller's work in the area of improving asthma outcomes through school and community interventions was noted by the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology with a 2006 Special Recognition Award.
Prior to joining the University of Chicago in January 2009, Dr. Miller served as national program director of New Health Partnerships, a demonstration project funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the California Health Care Foundation on collaborative self-management support.