Speaker

Jamila Lyiscott

Associate Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Jamila Lyiscott, Ph.D. — AKA Dr. J — is an aspiring way-maker, a community-engaged scholar, a nationally renowned speaker, and the author of “Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom.” She serves as an associate professor of social justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she co-founded and co-directs the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research.

Dr. J is most well-known for her TED Talk, “3 Ways to Speak English” and her poem “2053.” Dr. J is the recipient of the AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award, the AERA Scholar-Activist & Community Advocacy Award, and the CIES Ernest D. Morrell Emerging Scholar Award. Dr. J’s scholarship and activism work together to explore, assert, and defend the value of Black life globally. Her research examines the liberatory capacity of literacies in the lives of youth of color, racial healing, youth-led research, and the capacity of African Diasporic culture to transgress white coloniality.

Dr. J serves as co-editor of the journal of Equity & Excellence in Education and holds faculty fellowships at the University of Notre Dame, and Teachers College, Columbia University.  In her active efforts to disrupt the bounds of the academy, she has also been featured in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up,” on BBC Radio, NPR, Cosmopolitan, NowThis, and many other media outlets nationally and internationally.