Social Justice Corner (topic guide)

While we realize many Emory faculty are working and writing on social justice topics, these select Emory faculty have been recommended for their publications which can serve as suggested reading for the campus.  If you would like to recommend additional faculty to highlight, please use this suggestion form.  

ECAS 

Carol Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Professor Anderson’s current research and teaching focus on public policy; particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race, justice and equality in the United States. From Faculty Profile Page

See selected publications below. For more information see Dr. Anderson's curriculum vitae or website, or follow her on twitter.

Want to check out a book by Professor Anderson? Here's a list of her works in discoverE.

Kimberly Jacob Arriola, PhD, MPH is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences in the Rollins School of Public Health.  Her work focuses on studying social and behavioral factors that impact the health of marginalized populations and communities of color.  Arriola's Curriculum Vitae lists an extensive list of publications highlighting Health Disparities, Multicultural Studies, and Social Determinants of Health

There are clear and compelling racial disparities in access to renal transplant, which is the therapy of choice for many patients with end-stage renal disease. Kimberly Jacob Arriola's article, Race, Racism, and Access to Renal Transplantation among African Americans, conceptualizes the role of racism (i.e., internalized, personally-mediated, and institutionalized) in creating and perpetuating these disparities at multiple levels of the social ecology by integrating two often-cited theories in the literature.

Valerie Babb is Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University. She holds a joint appointment in the departments of African American Studies and English. She teaches courses in African American literature, American literature, and constructions of race in the United States. Her research explores African American literature and culture, the impact of racial whiteness on a multicultural US, and the mapping of communities in transition.

Want to check out a book by Professor Babb? Here's a list of her works in discoverE. For additional publications try this search in Google Scholar. 

Elizabeth Bounds is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of Faith and the City at Candler Theological Seminary.  Her CV lists her education and all her publications.  Elizabeth Bounds' research engages: 

• moral and theological responses to conflict and violence
• restorative justice and the U.S. criminal justice system
• peacebuilding and conflict transformation

Jericho Brown is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. He s author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award, the American Book Award, the  Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. See selected publications below. For more information see Jericho's website or follow him on twitter.

Want to check out a book by Jericho? Here's a list of his works in discoverE.

Dorothy A. Brown is a professor of law at Emory University School of Law. She is a nationally recognized scholar in tax policy, race, and class and has published extensively on the racial implications of federal tax policy. She is highly sought after for her expertise in workplace inclusion issues. Brown joined Emory Law in 2008, focusing on federal tax law and critical race theory in her courses and scholarship.

For more information, please visit Professor Brown's Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) Author Page and her faculty profile page.

Hannah L. F. Cooper, ScD is faculty at the Rollins School of Public Health and holds the Rollins Chair of Substance Use Disorders Research. Hannah Cooper’s CV list publications on studying the social determinants of drug-related harms, with a particular focus on harm reduction and health equity. 

Her new book, From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence, aims to understand the causes and distributions of excessive police violence and its disproportionate targeting of Black communities through a public health lens.  

Elizabeth Corrie is the Associate Professor in the Practice of Youth Education and Peacebuilding and the Director of the Religious Education Program at the Candler School of Theology.

Corrie's teaching draws on commitments to both peace with justice and the education of young people, particularly the development of teaching and ministry that empower people for global citizenship. She joined Candler’s faculty in 2007, and is also the director of the Religious Education Program. Her research interests include transformative pedagogy, theories of nonviolence, and conflict transformation. For more information, please see her faculty profile and CV.

For recent articles, try this search on Google Scholar.

Angela Dixon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Emory University. Dr. Dixon’s research interests include race/ethnicity, colorism, inequality, and racial health inequities. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy with a concentration in demography from Princeton University and her B.A. in Psychology with a second major in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2020, Dr. Dixon was a David E. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. For more information, please see Dr. Dixon's CV.

Dr. Dixon's Publications Include:

• Dixon, Angela R. 2019. “Colorism and Classism Confounded: Perceptions of Discrimination in Latin America.” Social Science Research 79: 32–55.
• Hamilton, Tod G., Janeria A. Easley, and Angela R. Dixon. 2018. “Black Immigration, Occupational Niches, and Earnings Disparities Between U.S.-Born and Foreign-Born Blacks in the United States.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 4(1): 60–77.
• Dixon, Angela R. and Edward E. Telles. 2017. “Skin Color and Colorism: Global Research, Concepts, and Measurement.” Annual Review of Sociology 43(1):405–24.

The Rev. Dr. Gregory C. Ellison II joined the Candler faculty in 2009. His teaching draws primarily from his work with the organization he founded called Fearless Dialogues, a non-profit organization that creates unique spaces for unlikely partners to have hard, heartfelt conversations on taboo subjects like racism, classism, and community violence.  Ellison’s research focuses on caring with marginalized populations, pastoral care as social activism, and 20th and 21st century mysticism.  For more information, view Ellison's webpage here.

The Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Fry Brown is the Bandy Professor of Preaching, a chaired professorship created in 1986 with a gift from B. Jackson Bandy that is considered by many to be the country’s premier chair in homiletics. Fry Brown has taught at Candler since 1994, and in 2010, she became the first African American woman to attain the rank of full professor. She also served as the Director of Candler’s Black Church Studies program until 2015.

Fry Brown’s research interests include homiletics, womanism, womanist ethics, socio-cultural transformation, and African diaspora history focusing on African American spiritual values.  For more information, view Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Fry Brown CV. 

Dr. Bernard Fraga is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on how group identities and electoral contexts impact individual political behavior. Professor Fraga's methodology tends toward the statistical analysis of observational, large-N data associated with voter registration records and election results. He also conducts research on election law and electoral institutions in the United States. Professor Fraga teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on American elections, racial/ethnic politics in the United States, and political science research methods. His monograph, The Turnout Gap : Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge University Press, 2018), explores how "persistent gaps in turnout and shows that elections are increasingly unrepresentative of the wishes of all Americans. These gaps persist not because of socioeconomics or voter suppression, but because minority voters have limited influence in shaping election outcomes. As Fraga demonstrates, voters turn out at higher rates when their votes matter; despite demographic change, in most elections and most places, minorities are less electorally relevant than Whites. The Turnout Gap shows that when politicians engage the minority electorate, the power of the vote can win."

Andra Gillespie is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. Gillespie’s teaching portfolio includes numerous classes on race and politics in the United States. She teaches the undergraduate survey course in African American politics, as well as a specialized course called “New Black Political Leadership.” She has also taught courses in political participation, experimental methods, and race and elections. Gillespie’s current research focuses on the political leadership of the post-civil rights generation. In addition to her academic work, Gillespie maintains an active public profile, providing regular commentary for local and national news outlets and on Twitter.  She has appeared on Atlanta’s local ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS, and PBS affiliates, as well as CNN, NPR and FamilyNet.  Her editorials have been featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post, and Politico.

Dr. Gillespie's other books contributions to edited volumes are available here.

Kali Gross is the Acting Professor of African American Studies at Emory. Her research explores Black women’s experiences in the U.S. criminal justice system. She has been featured in Vanity Fair, TIME, The Root, BBC News, Ebony, HuffPost, Warscapes, The Washington Post, and Jet and has appeared on new venues such as ABC, C-Span, NBC, and NPR. Her award-winning books include, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 and, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America. Her latest book, co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry, is A Black Women’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020).

For additional works by Professor Gross click here.

Erika V. Hall is an Assistant Professor of Organization & Management at the Goizueta Business School.  Her areas of expertise include Race Gender and Class in the Workplace, Minorities in Organizations, Organization and Management, and Social Psychology.  For more information, view Erika Hall's CV. 

Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Acting Professor of English at Emory University. On fellowship at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for American history during the academic year 2019-2020, Professor Guidotti-Hernández was a faculty member at UT Austin from 2012-2019 and the inaugural chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. She started her academic career at the University of Arizona from 2003-2011. Her book titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, Duke University Press (2011) was a finalist for the 2012 Berkshire Women’s History First Book Prize, won the MLA Chicana/o and Latina/o Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies for 2012. She has just completed her second book entitled Archiving Mexican Masculinities (Duke UP) and actively mentors graduate and undergraduate students in her areas of research.

Bayo Holsey is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University and the Director of the Emory Institute of African Studies. Her research and writing address public culture and history in West Africa and the African diaspora. She is the author of Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize and the Toyin Falola Africa book award. Currently, she is completing a second book entitled Tyrannies of Freedom: Race, Power, and the Fictions of Late Capitalism. Dr. Holsey received her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and previously taught in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. For more information about Professor Holsey, please see her CV. 

Tayari Jones is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory. She is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow and An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection and won the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo. For more information on Tayari see her webpage or twitter feed.

Axelle Karera is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She works at the intersection of 20th century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race (particularly Black critical theory), contemporary critical theory, and the environmental humanities. In addition to forthcoming work on Blackness and ontology, she is currently completing her first monograph titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she examines the question of relationality in new materialist ontology and speculative realism's purported return to metaphysics. More importantly, the book's investigations attempts the discern the ethical crux of critical thought in the age of the Anthropocene, with the aim to attend to its powerful - and perhaps even necessary - disavowals on matters pertaining to racial ecocide.

Publications from Professor Karera include:

Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a Peabody Award-winning podcast host, is a Professor of Practice in Emory's Creative Writing Program. He co-authored The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history. Prior to joining Emory, he was a reporter and editor for more than 35 years, held various reporting and editing positions in Mississippi, at The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and served as a managing editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He holds an undergraduate degree in English from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He directs the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University, for which students examine Georgia's modern civil rights history through the investigation of unsolved and unpunished racially motivated murders. His podcast, "Buried Truths," produced by WABE public radio station, won Peabody and Robert F. Kennedy awards in 2019.

Kyle Lambelet is a Louisville Postdoctoral Fellow at the Candler School of Theology. He teaches and researches at the intersection of political theology, religious ethics and social change. His current research examines the apocalyptic dimensions of talk about climate change, and how apocalyptic political theologies can offer resources for pastoral and political engagement in the midst of endings. For more information, see his faculty profile and CV.

For a list of Dr. Lambelet's articles, see this search on Google Scholar.

Tené T. Lewis, PhD is an associate professor in the Rollins School of Public Health.  Her primary area of research is psychology/psychosocial epidemiology, with an emphasis on cardiovascular health in women.  She has a particular interest in understanding how psychological and social factors contribute to the disproportionately high rates of cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality observed in African-American women compared to women of other racial/ethnic groups.  

Her recent article on Self-Reported Experiences of Discrimination and Health suggests that these self-reported experiences of discrimination are a form of psychosocial stress that has an adverse impact on both mental and physical health outcomes across a range of racial/ethnic groups.

Emily Liu is an associate director of employer relations at the Goizueta Business School 

Wesley Longhofer joined the Goizueta Business School in 2012 after receiving his PhD in sociology from the University of Minnesota. His research and teaching interests include organizational sociology, institutional theory, nonprofits and philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, international law, and the environment. He has also published broadly on voluntary associations, environmental non-profits, and environmental policy reform. His current research includes a global study of philanthropic foundations, a comparative analysis of participation in charitable organizations, and a number of papers on child rights and environmental policies. He has also been awarded for his teaching, written extensively for the popular scholarly magazine Contexts, and is the co-editor of Social Theory Re-Wired (Routledge 2012).

Ellen Ott Marshall is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Conflict Transformation. Marshall's areas of expertise are:

• contemporary Christian ethics
• peace building, violence, and conflict transformation 
• gender and moral agency 

For a list of Dr. Marshall's articles, see this search on Google Scholar. 

Michael Leo Owens is Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.  The author of God & Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), his current projects include his Prisoners of Democracy project that studies public policies and political attitudes towards people convicted of felonies and political behavior by felons as democratic citizens. He has published widely on topics of public-private partnerships, nonprofits and politics, church-state politics, and criminal justice reform, in journals such as Urban Affairs Review, American Politics Research, Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Urban Affairs and Perspectives on Politics.

He serves on the Board of Directors of Prison Policy Initiative, the Advisory Board of the Georgia Justice Project, the National Advisory Board of Foreverfamily, Inc., and the Editorial Boards of Politics & Religion and the Journal of Urban Affairs. He is a former Chair of the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association.

Before joining the Emory faculty, Dr. Owens conducted public policy research for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the New York State Temporary Commission on Constitutional Revision. He also served on the legislative staff of the New York State Senate.

For a full list of Dr. Owens' research, consider the following search in Google Scholar.

Nichole R. Phillips is the Associate Professor in the Practice of Sociology of Religion and Culture, the Director of Black Church Studies at Emory University, and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Emory Center for Ethics. Her main areas of interest are as follows:

• moral commitments and vision of community and congregational members (intersection of religion and American public life with a focus on community and congregational studies)
• religion, critical race, gender, and cultural memory studies
• sociology of science and religion

For more information, please see her profile page and her CV. Her Twitter hashtag is @phillipsnr6.

If you would like to check out out a book by Professor Phillips, please see a list of her works in discoverE. A list of his articles, see this search on Google Scholar.

Peter Roberts is  a professor of Organization & Management at the  Goizueta Business School and the founder and Academic Director of Social Enterprise at Goizueta (SE@G), an action oriented research center committed to making markets work for more people, in more places, and in more ways. He take actions via programs like

• Start:ME Atlanta,
• Grounds for Empowerment, and
• Transparent Trade Coffee

that aspire to bring prosperity to marginalized people and places around Atlanta and around the world. 

Dehanza Rogers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University. She previously held an academic appointment at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Courses taught at Emory include Narrative Filmmaking and Cinematography.

Professor Rogers works both in documentary and narrative filmmaking. Her films have screened at over 100 festivals around the world, as well on PBS and cable. Her latest project, #BlackGirlhood, explores the criminalization of Black girls in schools and was partially funded by Eastern State Penitentiary’s "Criminal Justice Today" grant.

She is a 2019 Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow.

See the video below for more information on #BlackGirlhood

Originally from Decatur, Walter C. Rucker—Professor of African American Studies and History—earned his BA from Morehouse College and his MA and PhD from the University of California-Riverside. Before his arrival at Emory, he was Professor of History at Rutgers University. A specialist in early Atlantic African diaspora and African American history, his teaching and research focus on the generative nexus between slave resistance and culture. Professor Rucker has received a range of awards including the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service (ASWAD, 2017), the Ida B. Wells & Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Outstanding Scholarship & Leadership in Africana Studies (NCBS, 2008), the Lawrence Williamson Black Graduate & Professional Student Caucus Service & Mentoring Award (Ohio State, 2007), and the Harold & Esther Edgerton Award for Excellence in Research & Teaching (UNL, 2003).

Professor Rucker is currently working on three book projects—“Black Atlantic Crosscurrents: Revolutionary Spaces in the Diasporic Imaginary,” “The Birth of a Notion: A Century of Racial Violence and Mass Incarceration in America,” and "Culture & Resistance: A Global History of African Americans."

Alyasah “Ali” Sewell  is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Race and Policing Project. Their areas of expertise are: 

• political economic approaches of health and health care
• neighborhood effects approaches to human development
• critical racisms approaches of systemic inequality 
•  the illness spillovers of institutionalized inequities (specifically, policing and housing)
•  ethnoracial inequities in lay attitudes toward medicine
•  the racialization of sociopolitical economies
•  the matrix of domination

For more information, see Dr. Sewell's website. 

For a list of Dr. Sewell's publications,see this search on Google Scholar. 

Fred Smith Jr. is associate professor at Emory University School of Law. He is a scholar of the federal judiciary, constitutional law, and local government and works to promote equity and social justice.  His CV  lists his education and publications.  

Kylie Smith is an Associate Professor with Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities. Her research focuses on the history of psychiatry, history of nursing, racism and civil rights in health care, Her forthcoming book is "Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South." 

"Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South." looks at the impact of the Civil Rights Act on racist practices in psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and compares the reactions of these state governments to the mandate to integrate. In doing so, her work will reveal the horrific conditions that existed for African Americans in state asylums and make links between past practices and current disparities in mental health.

Heeju Sohn is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Emory University. She received a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and has completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health and the California Center for Population Research. She also has degrees in Operations Research and Information Engineering (M.Eng) and Hospitality Management (B.S) from Cornell University. Dr. Sohn’s research intersects health policy with family demography, social stratification, and health across the life-course. Recent projects funded by the National Institutes of Health have focused on the role of health policy and demographic trends in creating unequal safety-nets that reinforce social inequities. Her research aims to inform effective health and family policy that will alleviate the pervasive disadvantage that persists across generations.

Carl Suddler is an African American historian whose research interests lie at the intersections of youth, race, and crime. Suddler’s scholarship is committed to developing better understandings of the consequences of inequity in the United States. His research and teaching interests are related to twentieth-century U.S. history, African American urban history, histories of crime and punishment, the carceral state, sport history, and histories of childhood and youth. 

Patrick  Sullivan is a Professor of Epidemiology and Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health.  His many areas of interest include engaging African American and Latino MSM for HIV Testing and Prevention Services through Technology.  Patrick  Sullivan’s CV list many publications and projects that highlight care for vulnerable populations using data visualization infectious disease modeling. 

COVID WORK - A project led by Patrick Sullivan,PhD, DVM, David Benkeser, PhD, MPH, and other collaborators looks at the racial disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths across the United States. The study shows that counties with predominately Black populations account for nearly 50 percent of all COVID-19 cases and more than 50 percent of COVID-19-related deaths. Their work was recently highlighted on CNN and can be viewed in detail—along with accompanying graphics—on the following website: https://ehe.amfar.org/disparities

Calvin Warren is an Associate Professor in African American Studies and WGSS, and his research interests are in the area of

• Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy),
• Lacanian psychoanalysis,
• queer theory, B
• lack Philosophy,
• Afro-pessimism, and
• theology.

Melissa J. Williams is an associate professor of Organization & Management at the Goizueta Business School and studies what happens when social identities (gender, race, stigma, or national culture) collide with workplace hierarchies. Williams' CV list a variety of publications focused on Diversity & Inclusion.

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, and a Montgomery Fellow at Darhmouth College. His main areas of research are as follows:

• critical philosophy of race
• critical whiteness studies
• critical phenomenology (especially racial embodiment), 
• African-American philosophy and philosophy of the black experience.

Yancy is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. He has published numerous books and articles. Selected publications are listed below. His article, "Dear White America," in the New York Times won the American Philosophical Association Committee on Public Philosophy's Op-Ed Contest in 2016. For more information on his other publications, please see his website. His Twitter hashtag is @ProfGeorgeYancy.

If you would like to check out out a book by Professor Yancy, please see a list of his works in discoverE. For a list of his articles, see this search on Google Scholar.

Associate Professor Rocío Zambrana's work examines critiques of capitalism and coloniality in various philosophical traditions, especially Marxism, Decolonial Thought, and Feminisms of the Américas (Latinx, Latin American, Caribbean). Her current work explores coloniality as the afterlife of colonialism, considering the articulation and deployment of race/gender as crucial to the development and resilience of capitalism. She considers the manifestations of coloniality in a colonial context by examining fiscally distressed Puerto Rico.

Professor Zambrana came to Emory alongside two other Latinx studies scholars, Professors Bernard L. Fraga and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, as part of an effort to bolster interdisciplinary scholarship and strengthen mentorship for a diverse student body at Emory. Click here to read more about this hire.

Professor Zambrana's Twitter handle is @zambranarocio

Monica Garcia Blizzard (SpanPort)
Alix Chapman (AAS)
Pearl Dowe (AAS/Pol Sci)
Janeria Easley (AAS)
Justin Hosbey (Anth)
January LaVoy (Theater)
Maria Montalvo (History)
Sergio Delgado Moya (SpanPort)
Jennifer Sarrett (Health)
Jessica Stewart (AAS)
Chris Suh (History)
Meina Yates - Richard (AAS)
Tiphanie Yanique (CW)