Research Focus
I believe the insights of White anti-racist allies can work to change the stories being told in rural communities that dehumanize Black and Indigenous peoples. I am investigating how social relations and social movements for human dignity manifest in these sparsely populated regions that have dependent economic, political, and social relationships with regional metropoles. My project is a dialogical narrative analysis with ally genesis stories shared by a group of White anti-racist activists living in the North Country of New York state. What do these stories tell us about White settler allies “holding their own” in their anti-racist activism in a specific place and time? Can they play a role in healing the brokenness of privilege-informed trauma across intersectional social identities, especially race and class? What are the limits of extrapolating allyship vis a vis patriarchy and White supremacy? In my work I confront my positionality as a university-based researcher. I also address:
- Whether this project can work against Indigenous erasure by centering the stories of White allies who are grappling with living on Land of Haudenosaunee peoples.
- How deeply rooted liberal notions of individualism, universalizing, and objectivity prevent solidarity between settlers and Indigenous peoples; and if interrogating private property, the discourse of progress, and theoretical dualisms can help to nurture reciprocal, knowledge sharing relationships and action projects.
- The role of relational networks in encouraging ally risk-taking and continued growth and commitment to social movements.
My research is grounded in the understanding that race is the defining feature in rural United States, an often invisible construct that provides rural people of European descent – settlers – with a sense of power, regardless of their class standing. While I aim to answer questions of interest to both the field and to communities, as an anti-racist community organizer involved in movements for human dignity, I want to change the stories being told in rural communities toward a more humanizing narrative.
White supremacy movements also are using stories such as the great replacement to make life more dangerous for people of color and Indigenous peoples, especially in rural areas that are more geographically isolated. What does their embrace by most rural White people show about the interactions between rural institutions and political and economic elites who live and work in urban areas? How do these stories allow White people to place themselves at the center of the capitalist project? And how are some people able to resist their socialization into White supremacy culture?
Professional Experience
I have dedicated my entire working life to serving the public good, and see my purpose as strengthening democracy. I have spent more than 20 years in higher education creating campus-community partnerships, facilitating dialogues across difference, and designing civic engagement leadership programs. With the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement at Cornell University, I founded the Sga:t ędwatahí:ne Fellows program, guided by the Two Row Wampum or Gaswéñdah and created one of the only national group-based leadership programs. I have taught Introduction to Sociology at Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3) with a focus on C. Wright Mills, whose concept of milieux I center in my work. Before transitioning to higher education, I spent eight years in youth development, including five years with the Missouri Division of Youth Services in the Ozarks where I saw rural poverty – and resistance to it – previously unknown to me. I have years of community and university experience connecting race and movements for justice, including cultivating the type of collective leadership and consciousness development in students who seek to participate in the social movements I study.
Education
- Georgetown University (BA)
- Harvard Graduate School of Education (M.Ed.)
