Bio
I was born and raised in the capital city of Mississippi, a place infamous as the site of Medgar Ever’s assassination, Freedom Riders, the arrest of the Tougaloo Nine for staging a read-in at a whites only library (1961), Rep. John Lewis’ arrest for using a whites only restroom (1961), and the murders of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green as a result of 460 rounds fired into a student residence hall by police on the campus of Jackson State University (1970). The state of Mississippi is probably most notoriously known for the brutal death of Emmitt Till in the town of Money. Even today, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Prison has received national attention for the inhumane conditions that prisoners are subjected to. Despite its violent racial past and present, the “City with Soul” in the center of the hospitality state remains a large part of who I am today.
My love for sociology grew out of my intrigue for social psychology. Realizing that I could garner this love for social psychology to aid in examining social issues, namely inequality, I recognized that sociology was the route through which I could ask the questions that were important to me, and attempt to answer those questions.
My research agenda as a budding sociologist/scholar stems from this hodgepodge of interests in issues relevant to environmental justice, health, inequality, and race/ethnicity. My partiality to social psychology remains, as I always find my way back to examinations of larger “macro” social issues from a more micro lens. As a scholar at the beginning of my career in academia, my experiences as both a scholar/student, an educator, and an activist has shaped my scholar-activism and the way I approach research and the classroom.
