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“Not the boys less, but the girls more.” — Anna Julia Cooper A Voice from the South. 1892
AJC CENTER FREEDOM SCHOOLS Achieving 5 months reading gain in 6 weeks!
AJC ANNUAL LECTURE
COLLABORATIVE TO ADVANCE EQUITY
The nation’s leading intersectional lecture series
Leading $75 million in commitments to women and girls of color..
BUILDING THE LEGACY JANUARY 2012- JULY 2018
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FOUNDING DIRECTOR MESSAGE The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.” - Anna Julia Cooper
These are the only words written or spoken by an American woman quoted in the current United States passport. This means every American traveling across the globe today carries along Anna Julia Cooper; a black woman born in North Carolina in the final decade of American slavery. She spent her extraordinary life as a scholar, educator, and activist, challenging the boundaries of gender, race, and location that sought to confine her. She pressed against these limitations, not only for herself, but for those she referred to as “neglected peoples” She was especially committed to children who many others believed could not learn or achieve.
With her legacy as our guide, the tiny but mighty team of the Anna Julia Cooper Center has accomplished ambitious and transformative scholarship, programming, and policy change far exceeding our size and resources. Leading this center since its founding in January 2012 easily has been the greatest privilege of my academic and professional career. The dedicated students, brilliant scholars, and peerless professionals of AJC Center have demonstrated their extraordinary capacity to convene and communicate intersectional ideas for the benefit of women and girls of color and to bring about justice-based outcomes at the local and national level. This report tells just a fraction of the story of this innovative and exciting place, which has brought me far more challenges and joys than I could have imagined at its founding.
Melissa Harris-Perry Maya Angelou Presidential Chair Founding Director, Anna Julia Cooper Center
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CONTENTS ABOUT US AJC Center History
AJC Center Team
FACILITATING INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH AJC Center Postdoctoral Fellows
 AJC Center Undergraduate Fellows
Faculty Research Seminar
Annual Writing Retreat
DIVERSIFYING AMERICAN MEDIA Ida B. Wells Residency
ELLE.com Scholars
BLACK on CAMPUS
Ida B. Wells Training
AMPLIFYING INTERSECTIONAL SCHOLARSHIP Anna Julia Cooper Annual Lecturers
Weekly Newsletter
Syllabus Project
CURRICULUM AJC Center in the Classroom
Girls Stories: Featured Course
AJC Center Beyond the Classroom
CONFERENCES Gender, Sexuality, Hip-Hop, 2013
Gender, Health, and South, 2015
Advancing Equity for Women and Girls of Color, 2015
Know Her Truths 2016
Know Her Truths 2018
MAJOR INITIATIVES AJC Center Freedom School
Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research
RESOURCES
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ADVANCING JUSTICE THROUGH INTERSECTIONAL SCHOLARSHIP AND ENGAGEMENT. 

SINCE 2012
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ABOUT AJC SECTION I
*Photo credit Ann Thuy Nguyen
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AJC CENTER HISTORY
In April 2013, AJC Project hosted civil rights leader Diane Nash, who spoke at length to more than 300 attendees. Nash encouraged the audience to support social change through vigorous student organizing while respecting the wisdom and experience of those living within communities who have experience, knowledge and capacity for identifying and solving their own challenges.
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In January 2012, Professor Melissa Harris-Perry established the The Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race and Politics in the South as part of the Newcomb College Institute at Tulane University. From the outset, the project served as a curricular hub for courses focused on intersectional identities of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation; provided faculty with opportunities for intellectual collaboration, collegial interaction and scholarly support; and oered meaningful events for local community audiences. The AJC Project established an interdisciplinary faculty working papers seminar, an annual lecture, an undergraduate research fellows program, a youth essay contest, and hosted national speakers. From its inception, the AJC Project formed and sustained mutually respectful relationships with community based organizations. For example, the AJC Project worked closely with New Orleans based Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies (IWES) to support research, preparation, and publication of Crooked Room: Stories from New Orleans. AJC Project also collaborated with the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center to host policy conferences and bring impactful speakers to the broader community. 
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AJC CENTER HISTORY July 1, 2014, founding director Melissa Harris-Perry returned to Wake Forest University as Presidential Endowed Professor of Politics & International Affairs. During the 2014-2015 academic year the Anna Julia Cooper Center operated with a planning grant from the office of the Provost and established its core programmatic efforts on the Reynolda Campus including: the interdisciplinary faculty working papers seminar, undergraduate student researchers, partnerships with other universities and community based organizations, and the Anna Julia Cooper Annual Lecture.
In March 2015, the AJC Center submitted a five-year plan spelling out clear objectives and specific aims including the following.
• Produce and support scholarship from multiple fields, perspectives, and methodological approaches that investigate political questions at the intersections of gender, race, and regional identity through postdoctoral fellowships, competitive research grants, bi-annual research projects, and publications.
• Enhance curricular offerings focused on the intersections of gender, race and politics through teacher-scholar postdoctoral fellowships; fellows will introduce new courses to Wake Forest University, which can become regular offerings in their departments
• Nurture research, teaching, and careers of young scholars studying gender, race and politics through robust and nationally recognized postdoctoral fellowship program, which prepares scholars at the postdoctoral or ABD stage to become leaders in their fields
• Encourage young scholars to integrate an intersectional framework into their research and academic work through an undergraduate research fellows program and curricular offerings
• Create a central meeting place for research and scholarly engagement with race, gender, and politics, while building cross-institutional support, through monthly research seminars for Piedmont-area faculty and bi-annual national conferences held in conjunction with institutional partners
• Act as a catalyst for cross-institutional research projects and engagement through robust partnerships with Bennett College, Vanderbilt University, and other partner institutions
• Leverage technology and emerging media to promote the work of scholars and to connect students and community in meaningful ways. Offer students advanced and unique research opportunities with established scholars at Wake Forest and across the country through a summer research trip
• Establish and maintain productive, impactful and accountable relationships with community partners through campus-community collaborative research projects. Host nationally recognized scholars, journalists, artists, and activists whose work advances the AJC Center mission
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AJC CENTER TEAM MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY
DANI PARKER-MOORE
2012-PRESENT
2015-PRESENT
Maya Angelou Presidential Chair
Assistant Professor, Department of Education
Founding Director,
Anna Julia Cooper Center
Associate Director, Anna Julia Cooper Center
Executive Director, AJC Center Freedom Schools
Director, Wake the Vote
Contributing Instructor, Wake the Vote
Executive Director, Pro
Professor Melissa HarrisPerry is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair. She is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center and founder and the innovative bi-partisan program, Wake the Vote.
For more than a decade, Harris-Perry has contributed to American public life through her distinct combination of scholarly analysis and ordinary wisdom applied to the analysis of race, gender, politics, and power. Currently, she is editor-atlarge of Elle.com and a contributing editor at The Nation.
She is the author of the award-winning Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, and Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Harris-Perry received her B.A. degree in English from Wake Forest University and her Ph.D. degree in political science from Duke University. She also studied theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Harris-Perry previously served on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and Tulane University. She serves on several boards and award committees GENDER
Professor of Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy and Social Foundations, Dr. ParkerMoore received her B.A. from North Carolina Central University, a Masters in Social Science from the University of Chicago, and a PhD. in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Her research interests include black mothers and their experiences with youth mentoring programs, and firstgeneration and underrepresented students’ access to college and graduate school. Her research also focuses on the ways in which parents utilized partnerships to leverage outcomes for youth of color, with particular focus on the campus-based CDF Freedom School, where she serves as Executive Director.
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AJC CENTER TEAM ROLISA TUTWYLER
CAMRY WILBORN
2015-PRESENT
2016-PRESENT
Assistant Director, AJC Center
Business Manager, Pro Humanitate Institute (2015-2018)
Rolisa Tutwyler has spent more than two decades working as a chief-of-staff, lead administrator, budget specialist, travel coordinator and personal representative for individuals and organizations. Rolisa came to Wake Forest University with experience in leading institutions of higher education, including, the University of Virginia School of Law and the University of Chicago.
Rolisa oversaw the initial Ford Foundation Grant establishing the Black Youth Project at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago and has coordinated both private and federal grants since joining Wake Forest University. Her skills as manager and mentor have made her among the most respected professionals at Wake Forest University. Rolisa serves on the board of the Shalom Project.
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Coordinator of External Programs
Site Coordinator, AJC CDF Freedom Schools
AJC Center/ Gen Forward Fellow (2017-18)
Presidential Fellows, AJC Center (2016-17)
Camry Wilborn is the Coordinator of External Programs for the Anna Julia Cooper Center. In her role, Camry supports a variety of externally facing research initiatives and manages communications for the center. She also serves as the national coordinator for the Collaborative to Advance Equity for Women and Girls of Color. In the summer, she serves as the site coordinator for the Anna Julia Cooper Center CDF Freedom School, a free literacy program for rising 3rd-5th graders. She previously held the position of Wake Forest University Presidential Fellow at the Anna Julia Cooper Center from 2016-2017. Camry holds a B.A in Politics and International Affairs and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Wake Forest University and a M.A in Social Science from the University of Chicago.
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PAST TEAM MEMBERS SARA KUGLER DIRECTOR OF EXTERNAL PARTNERSHIPS 2014-2018 RESEARCH ASSOCIATE 2012-2014
Sara Kugler was the very first staff member of the Anna Julia Cooper Center, joining the team while completing her senior year of college at Tulane University. She helped develop the initial programming, set the vision and structure for the early organization, and shepherded AJC Center through its initial months and years. In many ways Sara Kugler and AJC Center “grew up” together. Sara Kugler’s final role with AJC Center was director of external partnerships. In this position she worked closely with the founding director to set the agenda and direction of the the center, manage the center’s partnerships, direct external communications and initiatives and coordinate the Collaborative to Advance Equity for Women and Girls of Color. In July 2018, Ms. Kugler left AJC Center for the National Crittenton Foundation which catalyzes social and systems change for girls and young women impacted by chronic adversity, violence, and injustice. Ms. Kugler also serves as Senior Associate of the OJJDP National Girls Initiative. MALIQUEA STARNES ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT 2017
Maliquea Starnes was the administrative assistant of the Anna Julia Cooper Center in 2017. She left to start her own business and is now the owner and certified wedding planner of Starnes and Co. Event Planning, in Winston-Salem North Carolina. Although her time with AJC Center was brief, she was a valued team member who brought unique and necessary assets to the team. Ms. Starnes contributions to planning and executing the 2017 Rethinking Community conference with the Pro Humanitate Institute and Eudaimonia Institute conference cannot be overstated.
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*Photo credits this page Ann Thuy Nguyen
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FACILITATING
INTERSECTIONAL RESEARCH SECTION II
Photo credit: Ann Thuy Nguyen
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AJC CENTER POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS The postdoctoral program is the Anna Julia Cooper Center’s most powerful tool for creating a hub of intellectual collaboration, collegial interaction, and scholarly support focused around interdisciplinary research on the intersectional gender, race, and place. Bi-annually, the AJC Center engages in a rigorous national search; inviting applicants from a broad range of social science disciplines, and offering two years of close mentorship, extensive teaching experience, and opportunities to a pursue rigorous research agenda within a supportive intellectual community. To date three extraordinary scholars have completed the AJC Center postdoctoral program and a fourth scholar will join the center in Fall 2018.
Dr. Trimiko Melancon (AJC Tulane, 2013-2014) Since completing her AJC postdoc, Dr. Melancon edited a volume of essays, authored a monograph, and earned tenure.
Trimiko Melancon is Associate Professor and Co-Director of Women's Studies Program at Loyola University New Orleans. Dr. Melancon earned her B.A. in English and her M.A. and Ph.D. in African American Studies. Her teaching and scholarly interests lie primarily in African American and American literary and cultural studies; black feminist theories and criticism; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; African American and Black German studies; and race, media, and digital/cultural production. She was the inaugural visiting scholar and fellow at the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South at Tulane University. She is the author of Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (Temple University Press, 2014), as well as the co-editor of Black Female Sexualities (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Her publications also appear in leading journals in her interdisciplinary fields of expertise: African American Review, Callaloo, and the Journal of Popular Culture, as well as Reconstruction, among other venues.
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POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS DR. SHERRI WILLIAMS
(AJC Wake Forest, 2015-2017)
Upon completing her AJC postdoc, Dr. Williams joined the faculty of American University as an Assistant Professor in Race and Communication on the tenure track. The communication & media studies program is ranked 5 nationwide.
Dr. Sherri Williams studies social media, social television and how people of color use and are represented on social media and how people of color and marginalized people are represented in the media. She appeared on CNN’s Piers Morgan Live show to discuss social media images of Rachel Jeantel after Jeantel testified in the George Zimmerman trial. She was also interviewed by USA Today for her social media expertise. Williams’ dissertation focuses on images of women of color on reality television and Twitter. Williams presented her knowledge on black social television twice at SXSW Interactive. She taught journalism writing, media diversity and women/gender studies classes at Syracuse University where she incorporated social media into her courses. Before entering academia Williams was a print journalist for a decade including at The Associated Press. She covered several beats including education, courts, social services and immigrant/ minority/marginalized communities and traveled to South Africa and Cuba on journalism fellowships. Her work has appeared in Essence, Ebony, Upscale, Heart & Soul, The Source and The Quill magazines.
Dr. Williams remained a core contributor after joining the faculty of American University. In 2017-2018, she co-directed Black on Campus, a national student journalism program partnering AJC Center and The Nation. Her continued research efforts on the traumatic effects of social media exposure to black death kept her in close working relationship with several local scholars. Dr. Williams continued to hold the title and responsibilities of Director of Media Research and Education for the Center.
“The Anna Julia Cooper Center Postdoctoral Fellowship gave me an opportunity to learn more about the operations of academia and how to put interests in social justice research into practice. By collaborating with the AJC Center staff I learned to execute programming that engaged and enriched students as well as the Wake Forest University and Winston-Salem communities. I was able to fuse my professional journalism experience and my scholarly interests in representations of women of color by creating the intersectional multimedia storytelling class which focused on students producing work about reproductive health and by working with the Elle.com Media Scholars who researched and produced media content about women of color.” -- Dr. Sherri Williams
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POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS DR. JAIRA HARRINGTON
(AJC Wake Forest, 2015-2017)
Upon completing her AJC postdoc, Dr. Harrington was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award and is residence at the University of Sao Paulo
Dr. Jaira J. Harrington earned a doctorate of Political Science from the University of Chicago. Jaira is a firstgeneration college graduate, West Side Chicago native and Spelman College alumna. Jaira’s research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, NSEP Boren Fellowship, and the Tinker Grant Foundation. Some of her proudest accomplishments at the University of Chicago include the 2011 Jane Morton and Henry C. Murphy Award, in recognition of her campus service in her department, at OMSA, and the broader Chicago community, and the 2015 Wayne C. Booth Prize for Teaching Excellence, the highest teaching honor given to a graduate student lecturer at the University. JESSICA LYNN STEWART JOINS AJC Wake Forest Fall 2018
Political Science PhD Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles studying American Politics and Race-Ethnicity, Stewart’s research interests include public opinion, political economy and political geography. She has a Master of Science in Health Systems Management and completed an administrative fellowship at Mayo Clinic before pursuing a doctorate in political science. Stewart is a dedicated teacher and researcher currently teaching a seminar at UCLA on Race, Place, and Political Economy, while working on a dissertation examining how socioeconomic context influences perceptions of American racial progress.
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TEACHER-SCHOLAR MODEL *
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Demonstrating the very best example of how the AJC Center postdoctoral fellows enhances the teacher/ scholar model at Wake Forest University, Professor Sherri Williams led a team of Wake Forest graduate and undergraduate student researchers during herAJC postdoctoral years. Their collaboration earned media attention, contributed to scholarly publications and opportunities for joint presentations. Here they present at the 2017 SXSW conference.
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UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWS The Anna Julia Cooper Center supports undergraduate research opportunities in multiple ways. Since the Center’s founding we have crafted various programs. Some have employed entirely independent efforts to identify and pursue questions of interest to students. Other programs have created cohorts for students to work together on a single research agenda using the model of a laboratory of study. Still other initiatives have supported undergraduate students who work closely with faculty members in departments across campus to pursue joint scholarly endeavors. In each case, the work of the Anna Julia Cooper Center is to identify interested students, nurture capacity, develop skills, offer guidance, and provide resources for intersectional scholarship.
AJC Center was the first research experience for most fellows.
“I totally credit my AJC experience for turning me on to the importance of research and scholarship.”
AJC Center offered fellows opportunities to learn outside of the classroom and to travel.
“In addition to the research itself, the opportunities to travel to Washington D.C. illustrated for me how scholars can engage with broader political and social movements so that their impact can move beyond books and journal articles and into policies and people’s lives.”
“I was given the opportunity to create my own research project giving me valuable experience supplementing my classroom work as well as preparing me for the graduate school application process.”
All graduates who are former AJC Center fellow have moved on to full time jobs, graduate, or professional school, many in institutions more prestigious than their undergraduate alma maters
4 went to law school
2 to medical school
7 went on to full time jobs
6 went on to graduate school for PhDs or Master Degrees GENDER
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Former fellows agree their experiences had meaningful real world connections. " “The AJC provided an invaluable space for me [to] develop my theoretical capacity as a scholar.” " “profound learning opportunity as an undergraduate” " “In addition to learning exactly what it means to do professional research, my research taught me to look at community problems with an interdisciplinary lens and how to [begin] crafting solutions to resolve large social conflicts.” " “My fellowship helped me gain valuable research skills and broadened my interests in both sociology and women’s studies. It was also especially helpful in improving my public speaking confidence and abilities.” " “AJC helped me develop…questions and it taught me how to take risks to answer it.” " “Simply put, the Anna Julia Cooper Center gave me the tools and support I needed to become a researcher, organizer, and advocate.” " “All of these experiences helped me grow as a student, scholar working in intersectional research, and as a person in gaining skills, confidence in research and more. AJC Center offered fellows support for personal and research interests " “My research with AJC informed me on theoretical perspectives related to migration that I still employ in my research today when think about displacement.” " “The research fellowship enabled me to bridge the two worlds [biomedical sciences and health care policy] and contemplate my future path in medicine and public policy.” " “AJC Center was instrumental in beginning my desire to pursue academic research and teaching.”
Professor Harris-Perry accompanied senior AJC fellows Nia Evans and Anna Grace Tribble on a research trip to Washington, DC. It was Nia Evans’ research, which led to the AJC Center’s initial meeting with the White House Council on Women’s and Girls during this trip. Relationships emerging from that first encounter led AJC Center to eventually host a national conference at the White House in 2015, and to launch the national Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research for Women and Girls of Color. The questions asked by an undergraduate researcher proved a definitive turning point for the AJC Center and indeed for the nation. This is a reminder of the power of facilitating student research. GENDER
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS LEAH JAQUES (Fall 2012) I worked on the oral history project documenting and recognizing the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Tulane University. I also researched demographics on campus and examined race in higher education more broadly. We filmed interviews with 10 former students. I also conducted and filmed interviews with eight current students, two current professors and one senior administrator. I created graphics, video content and wrote excerpts for a physical exhibit on desegregation that was to be displayed on campus. We spoke to two exhibit designers in New Orleans to get advice on how to present our exhibit and I researched ways to display this exhibit physically and digitally. I also traveled to archives in Louisiana to get copies of news coverage of desegregation at Tulane to use in the exhibit. Since graduation I've been working as a legal assistant in Los Angeles, but I’m taking a break from my job and interning at a company in Tel Aviv that specializes in 3D design. I hope to be able to combine my creative skills with new technology to advance the causes that I care about. I look back very fondly on my time with AJC! I really loved the work I was doing because it gave me a chance to help document, preserve and share an important story in our history. I especially appreciated working with and learning from an impassioned group of people with different perspectives [to reflect] on this history.
VIRGINIA (GINI) MORGAN (Fall 2012) My academic and professional work has focused on enhancing access to reproductive health education and services. After graduation I was awarded a Clinton Fellowship for Service in India by the American India Foundation. I partnered with Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, a women’s empowerment organization, in Bhuj, Gujarat, where I helped lead their public health team. After my fellowship ended, I moved to Bangalore, India to work for BEMPU Health a MedTech start up. I was the Director of Public Health for BEMPU Health for almost 2 years and worked to develop and distribute life-saving medical devices to rural and low-income areas through public-private partnerships. I will earn my MPH from Columbia in 2019. My AJC Fellowship gave real-world context to the slogan I often heard around campus, "the personal is political". I had a tangible understanding of the intersection of race, gender, and class and the consequential impact on politics, health, and everyday life. Sara Kugler and Professor Harris-Perry were influential in building my feminist and political foundation.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS I worked on research marking the 50th anniversary of desegregation at Tulane University, My project was a timeline from the late 19th century until the present using primary resources from the Amistad Library. My primary mentor was Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry. “She helped me through the process. She was instrumental in helping me with the project and getting it where it needed to be.” Later that calendar year, Tulane University did an exhibit on the desegregation of the school. After graduation I interned with the National Council of La Raza, the largest Hispanic advocacy organization in the country, where I helped to coordinate and organize La Raza’s national conference. I then began working at an advertising and public relations agency, República in Miami, Florida. The agency focuses on multicultural marketing and I served as the right hand for the CEO and president. In this position I worked on accounts such as Toyota and Boehringer Ingelheim. I also had the responsibility of a campaign under the Obama White House (committocitizenship.org), which targeted US residents seeking citizenship, targeting them to apply.
BIANCA FALCON (Spring 2013) .
Morgan Franklin (2013-2014) I worked with Professor Trimiko Melancon, assisting her research for a book focused on black women’s responses to Hurricane Katrina. She was brilliant and I loved talking with her and learning with her. In the spring of 2013, I shifted to focus on my own research as I wrote a senior thesis on voter challenge initiatives, voter ID laws, and other potential mechanisms of voter suppression in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. After graduation I worked with the Democratic Party of Virginia then served as a White House intern in the Office of the First Lady. From there I went off to Harvard Law School School and graduated with a JD in 2017. I have been primarily focused on public policy work since finishing the law degree. Working with the Anna Julia Cooper Center and with Professor Harris-Perry taught me the foundational question of feminism: “what truths are missing here?” I take that question with with me into my policy work, my legal work, and the way I think about human behavior.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS I conducted research on the social and cultural risk factors behind cardiovascular disease among southern women, with a particular interest in women of color. I was interested in examining how cultural narratives and social norms structure the way we perceive women's risk for heart disease considering it is often viewed as a masculine illness. I primarily did literature review and media content analysis in order to uncover why cardiovascular disease is overwhelmingly portrayed and perceived to be a men's, particularly wealthy and white, issue. Dr. Angela Kocze was my faculty mentor who both encouraged and helped me throughout the process. I will begin pursuing my master's and PhD in sociology at Indiana University in the fall. After completing my PhD, I hope to teach at the collegiate level and continue doing research. The AJC Center was instrumental in beginning my desire to pursue academic research and teaching. My fellowship helped me gain valuable research skills and broadened my interests in both sociology and women's studies. It was also especially helpful in improving my public speaking confidence and abilities
CALLIE CLECKNER (SPRING 2015)
NIA EVANS (Spring 20015 ) My research addressed the link between student civic engagement and curriculum development. I’m currently working as an education organizer at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington DC. I’m tasked with mobilizing communities around the school-to-prison pipeline and educating advocates on the importance of using a race and gender lens when analyzing the pipeline. I hope to return to school next year to obtain a Masters in Public Policy. My time with the Anna Julia Cooper Center has shaped my career in a million ways. Ranging from my first job out of college as a researcher with a focus on curricular development to my current work as an organizer with a focus on mobilizing K-12 educators. Even my day to day work deals with my research question. Once I started investigating racial dynamics in the classroom, I never really stopped. How are students experiencing the classroom differently because of their race? How can teachers intervene and disrupt harmful narratives about Black people? What are the costs to failing to address those narratives? These are questions I asked in 2015. I'm still trying to answer. AJC helped me develop those questions and it taught me how to take risks to answer it. Simply put, the Anna Julia Cooper Center gave me the tools and support I needed to become a researcher, organizer, and advocate. And I will be forever grateful.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS Rachel Rubinstein (Spring 2013) I used my research to better understand how black women in the South, navigate intersectional stereotyping in their workplace and education. I worked with the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, who invited HarrisPerry's class to observe a series of conversation circles the Institute was hosting with this question in mind. This ultimately led to recommending that IWES target public schools as locations for their community health centers. During the fellowship I was interning with a charter management organization in New Orleans and then spent a year teaching at a charter school through TeachNOLA. This motivated me to apply to law school where I studied education law at the University of Richmond, and did a semester-long internship at the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in DC. I'm currently studying for the bar exam but I'll start working as an attorney in education policy this fall. I am extremely appreciative that I had such a profound learning opportunity as an undergraduate. In addition to learning exactly what it means to do professional research, my research taught me to look at community problems with an interdisciplinary lens and how to begin crafting solutions to resolve large social conflicts.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS
Benjamin Mills (Spring 2015) My research focused on the history of the reproductive rights movement, particularly in regard to women of color in the American South. Over the course of the semester, I drew from academic research, econometric analysis, and personal accounts of patients and providers to trace the evolution of reproductive rights to the present day. In terms of inspiration, what initially drew me to the topic was a news story on "The Pink House"--the last abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi--and the state's eorts to shut it down. After delving further into Mississippi's history, I also recalled its failed "personhood" amendment in 2011. I decided that due to its unique position at the forefront of restricting access to contraceptive services, the state would make an excellent case study to explore the growing disparity between public opinion and legislative action, and to answer the question of why the new millennium marked a watershed for pro-life legislation. My time with the AJCC was an extraordinary opportunity. I'm still having conversations about my research even two years later, particularly within the current political climate, and there are individuals I connected with over the course of my research that I still keep in touch with. Along that same vein, working with Sara Kugler, Dr. Harris-Perry, and the other research fellows was an amazing experience. The amount I learned from each one of them, academically and otherwise, was staggering. I consider the AJCC fellowship to be one of my fondest memories of my four years at Wake Forest, and am unbelievably grateful to have been chosen to serve. After the fellowship ended at the end of the Spring 2015 semester, I graduated with a double-major in Economics and Politics & International Aairs. Since graduation, I've worked been working in the executive search industry.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS
Anna Grace Tribble (Spring 2015) My inspiration for the project with AJC came from my research on the health of migrant farm workers with Dr. Arcury at Wake Forest School of Medicine. While Dr. Arcury’s research was collecting data on the health realities faced by migrant farm workers, I was also interested in the way that theory could be mobilized to think through policy problems.I read the theoretical literature on medical anthropology, political economy, immigrant bodies and illegality. I produced a new theoretical framework “Political Economy of Violence Against Immigrant Women”. I then used the framework to examine a federal and a state level policy – the Violence Against Women Act and California’s SB 1087 – in which the realities of Latina migrant farmworkers were being partially addressed. I’m working on my PhD at Emory University in biocultural anthropology, coupled with a dual Masters in Public Health degree in Global Epidemiology. I work in Iraqi Kurdistan with women living there who have been displaced now or in the past.
My research with AJC informed me on theoretical perspectives related to migration that I still employ in my research today when thinking about displacement. By 2019-2020, I’ll be moving to Iraq for my long term field research that will last one to two years depending on funding. After my PhD, I plan to work in a think tank, non-profit organization, or government body focused on the Kurdish Region, US-Iraq relations, the Middle East around topics including food security and health. The AJC provided an invaluable space for me develop my theoretical capacity as a scholar. In addition to the research itself, the opportunities to travel to Washington D.C. illustrated for me how scholars can engage with broader political and social movements so that their impact can move beyond books and journal articles and into policies and people’s lives.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS Sarah Rudasill (2015 and 2016) I completed two projects with the AJC. As I transitioned from the hard sciences to an economics major, I was looking for a research opportunity that would explore the broader implications of the Affordable Care Act. After taking a class on HIV narratives with Dr. Erica Still in my freshman year, I decided to study the impact of the Medicaid expansion on the HIVpositive community. I found that broadening access to Medicaid by eliminating the categorical requirement for access would benefit tens of thousands of HIV-positive individuals living in the U.S. South. For my second project, I was studying abroad at the University of Cambridge and developed an interest in comparing the outcomes of international health systems. While I knew of the significant differences in health outcomes among races in the United States, I was curious how those outcomes compared to the experiences of the United Kingdom. I worked with Dr. Nigel Allington to compare inequalities in breast and prostate cancer, finding that while the United States had lower overall mortality rates from the cancers, the inequalities in outcomes between races was much greater than those observed in the United Kingdom. When I presented my research at one of the conferences cohosted with Vanderbilt, I was actually offered a research position with Dr. Jonathan Metzl, one of Dr. Harris-Perry's close collaborators. I continue to work with Dr. Metzl to this day on public health research encompassing gun safety and health care policy.
I graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics in May 2017. I'm now attending the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine as a David Geffen Scholar, where I will spend the next four years earning my medical degree. My intention is to pursue a surgical career while also devoting significant attention to clinical research and medical education as a future professor of medicine. I am grateful for the research support from the Anna Julia Cooper Center because the mentorship came at a time when I wasn't quite satisfied with the hyper-focused biomedical sciences, yet I wasn't sure how to make an impact in the health care policy world. The research fellowship enabled me to bridge the two worlds and contemplate my future path in medicine and public policy. As I enter medical school, I know the research experience and policy knowledge that I've developed over the years will make me a better physician-researcher.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS Darius Williams (2015-2016) The research I conducted for AJC centered-around the rhetoric of incarceration by former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Through the intersectional lens of gender and race, I focused on how that rhetoric framed the federal approach to and the nation’s conception of incarceration. My faculty mentor was, Jarrod Atchison of Wake Forest’s Communication Department. Ultimately, my goal was to create a foundational paper that could eventually be expounded upon in graduate school. Currently, I’m completing the ACE Teaching Fellows program at the University of Notre Dame while earning my Masters in Education. I plan to do more service abroad before going back to school for my JD/MPP. My long-term goal is to eventually run for local, state, and then national office. What I loved most about AJC was the family feel. During one of the toughest periods of my life, I felt truly supported, encouraged and challenged to be my best self each day through the research and fellowship. To this day, even from a distance, Melissa Harris-Perry, Rolisa Tutwyler, Dani Parker, and my AJC peers continue to inspire me.
TJ Smith (2015-2016) My time with the Anna Julia Cooper Center provided me with many of the most impactful experiences of my undergraduate years. I was given the opportunity to create my own research project giving me valuable experience supplementing my classroom work as well as preparing me for the graduate school application process. I was given opportunities to learn from and contribute to community organizations during my summer internship as a community-engaged research intern. This experience proved incredibly valuable in helping me better understand the dynamics of my home state of North Carolina as well as the larger national issue of diaper need as well as prepared me for my current work in consulting. I was also given enormous opportunities in the form of being a part of the Research Collaborative to Advance Equity for Women and Girls of Color sponsored by the White House Council for Women and Girls. I cannot imagine any other situation in which I would have been able to be a part of policy development and learn from incredible people at multiple White House events. All of these experiences helped me grow as a student, scholar working in intersectional research, and as a person in gaining skills, confidence in research and more.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS SUVRA MOSTAFA 2016-2017
My anthropological research was on how young people in Winston-Salem find work and what it is like to work while attending school. My participants were primarily from low income backgrounds and most of them were people of color. My findings spoke to how working is a way to pull oneself up by their bootstraps and earn necessary money but also simultaneously contradictory because working interfered with teens' ability to participate in activities that would help them get ahead such as SAT preparation or spending extra time on homework. My research process was about two years long, which included completing an IRB, a research timeline, finding participants and analyzing data. The final product was completed in May 2017. I just completed my Masters of Social Science at UCLA. I will be applying to doctoral and law programs this fall as well for my next steps. My research actually sparked my interest in labour laws and treatment of workers. I think that the community that AJC fosters beyond just the fellowship is amazing and really allowed me to branch out of my academic bubble in the anthropology department. I also was able to find a direction in my career and personal goals which is to advance opportunities for young women and girls of color through research and education. I think that I would not be as successful or where I am today without the support from my mentors at AJC. I was also able to learn more about the different ways that university institutions and research play a part in the everyday lives of people, and how research can be used in more ways than just publishing and sharing among academia.
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VOICES OF PAST FELLOWS Mackenzie Wilkins (2017) I thought that the summer was a good time for me to structure my research. The group of people I wanted to study was a bit harder to do over the summer since public school would not be in session. That being said I was able to use the summer to formulate a plan and do preliminary research that would help me be better informed when for when I did begin to conduct interviews. I thought the research project I created was a good first project for someone with some research experience. I am really interested in counseling and how beneficial it is to individuals especially children so my research fit my interests fairly well. I am in my Senior year at Wake Forest with a major in Psychology and a minor in Schools, Education, and Society. After graduating I plan on attending graduate school for a MS or PhD in Counseling Psychology to work with children and athletes. I enjoyed being an AJC fellow. I liked that there was a space to discuss my research with other students and that there was a type of mentorship with faculty. I appreciate that the opportunity to continue my research into the school year was available for us since I was only able to conduct literature reviews over the summer. I liked the resources and workshops that were available. I think having this type of exposure to research is really beneficial and will help prepare me for graduate studies. I also enjoyed getting to know the other students and faculty in program.
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FACULTY SEMINARS
AJC Center hosts a monthly, interdisciplinary, crossinstitution, working papers seminar for area faculty whose research and teaching interests focus on issue of gender, race, and place. The monthly faculty research seminar provides a forum for faculty to present papers from their ongoing research. The seminar engages scholarship from multiple fields, perspectives, and methodological approaches. Participants explore intellectual connections with faculty at area institutions, hear and discuss current research, have the opportunity to present their own research, and receive feedback from faculty members and scholars whose work engages similar concerns. Each seminar has one designated presenter. Their paper is circulated one week prior to meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, the author presents the for 20 minutes, followed by a formal respondent oering feedback, then robust conversation and discussion for the remaining time.
2013-2014: AJC Project hosted 8 seminars with a total of 60 participants from 4 universities: Tulane, Xavier, Loyola, and the University of New Orleans 2014-2015: AJC Center hosted 6 seminars with a total of 47 participants from 3 area universities: Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem State, and High Point University. 2015-2016: AJC Center hosted 8 seminars with a total of 55 participants from five universities: Wake Forest University, Bennett College, Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina A&T, and UNC-Greensboro 2016-2017- AJC Center hosted 9 seminars with a total of 70 participants from from 7 universities: Wake Forest University, Bennett College, Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina A&T, UNC-Greensboro, Elon University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2017-2018 -A JC Center hosted 9 seminars with a total of 60 participants from from 7 universities: Wake Forest University, Bennett College, Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina A&T, UNC-Greensboro, Elon University and University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill 
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SUMMER WRITING RETREAT Each summer the Anna Julia Cooper Center hosts a one week writing retreat for faculty, graduate students, and professionals preparing scholarly manuscripts. The retreat is held on the campus of Wake Forest, oering a comfortable and dedicated space to write, and a supportive community to hold each participant accountable to their writing goals. In addition, participants are provided writing professional development opportunities.
Summer 2018 professional development seminars included:
Preparing for Writing: Nathan Ross Freeman, Award-winning script writer, filmmaker, creative writing and spoken word educator
Translating Academic Research for Reporters and a General Audience:
Dr. Melissa Harris -Perry,Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University.
Securing a Book Deal- Junior Faculty Discussions: Chezare Warren, Assistant Professor Michigan State University, 2016 Participant Anna Julia Cooper Center Summer Writing Retreat.
Discussion with the Editor: Courtney Berger Senior Editor & Editorial Department
Manager Duke University Press
Discussion with the Journal Editor, Preparing Manuscripts for Journal Publication: Dr. Deborah Best, William L. Poteat Professor of Psychology Wake Forest University, Editor in Chief, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
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WRITING RETREAT PARTICIPANT RESPONSES “I achieved my goal!”
“I was very successful. This was a difficult project to begin and it was so helpful to have a supportive space that allowed for brainstorming, sharing, and writing.”
“I've completed every project except for the full syllabus- though 70% of the content is there I made really good progress. The most important thing I gained from being at the retreat resulted from the initial workshop at the start of the week, which really helped me to zero in on my thesis and focus my subject in a way that I hadn’t in the 20 pages I have already written.”
“I made pretty good progress on my objective, although not as much as I anticipated. The main reason is because my objectives shifted after the (very helpful!) workshops. Chezare Warren's and Courtney Berger's sessions motivated me to start a first draft of my book proposal.”
“I came away from the week with a partial draft (4000 words). I was pleased, but would have liked a complete draft.”
“I exceeded my objectives. I am amazed by the amount of work I was able to get done during the week.”
“This week was wonderful and I definitely plan to come back in the future! One observation, however, is that although this was billed as a faculty writing retreat, there were a variety of professionals there (editors, journalists, undergrads, grad students, postdocs, VAPs, non-TT instructors, and TT/tenured professors). This isn't necessarily a bad thing-- I think there's value in having people who work in different fields share a writing space. However, for the future, it might be useful for the AJC Center to consider who the target audience is, and whether the retreat will be open to folks who are not the target audience. When I registered for the retreat, I anticipated that other participants would be primarily or exclusively people who research and teach at the college level in the humanities or social sciences. This is not to say that the retreat shouldn't be open to people who are not formally in academia. Perhaps the retreat should be a more general "writing retreat" for anyone who writes about race and gender instead of a "faculty writing retreat.”
is week was wonderful and I definitely plan to come back in the future! One observation, however, is that although this as billed as a faculty writing retreat, there were a variety of professionals there (editors, journalists, undergrads, grad GENDER
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DIVERSIFYING AMERICAN MEDIA SECTION III
Photo credit: Ann Thuy Nguyen
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IDA B WELLS RESIDENCY The Ida B. Wells Expert-inResidence program invites a distinguished journalist with a record of reporting about Southern political issues and with an eye for gender and racial justice for a year long virtual residency at Wake Forest University. The residency includes a campus visit to Wake Forest University, ongoing engagement with Wake Forest students, meaningful commitment to the AJC Center community, and sharing expertise with faculty and journalists in the AJC Center local and national network. The budget of AJC Center has allowed for this residency only twice, but it remains a priority for future development given the overwhelmingly positive response of students, staff, faculty and community to the program.
GENDER
Joy Ann Reid. Author and MSNBC Anchor (2015) During her residency Joy Reid met with students from the Old Gold & Black, Wake TV, DeaConnection, Forward Together, the Black Student Alliance, Trailblaze, the Social Justice Incubator, and the AJC Research Fellows and PHI Fellows; guest taught three classes (JOU 276: Community Reporting; COM370: Race, Gender, and Media; and POL210: Race, Class, and Social Justice; met with faculty from Communication, Politics & International Affairs, Journalism, History, the Law School, and the Divinity School; participated in the AJC Center’s faculty research seminar; hosted a national twitter conversation about covering race, gender, and politics in U.S. elections with Essence Magazine; met with students and faculty at Bennett College; and delivered a well-received public lecture “The Myth of Objectivity: How the Media Quest for ‘Fairness’ and ‘Balance’ Biases Coverage Against Out-Groups.”
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IDA B WELLS RESIDENCY
Tracy Clayton, Writer, Humorist and Host of Buzzfeed’s Another Round 2016-2017 As part of her yearlong residency, Tracy Clayton visited Wake Forest in both the Fall and Spring semesters. Her visits included public events with faculty, students, and community members encouraging broad, engaging conversations in her signature style of humor and insight. Prior to her visits, Clayton engaged the Wake Forest community through high profile social media events, and she developed a deep relationship with a small group of AJC Center students- the Elle.com/ AJC Scholars who traveled to New York City and worked directly with Clayton. Clayton contributed to publications by the Elle.com/AJC scholars and featured their work on her Buzzfeed podcast. She engaged regularly with Wake Forest students via social media during her residency, amplifying their work and presence via her significant following. In addition, Clayton hosted a live episode of BuzzFeed’s Another Round from Wake Forest University in November 2016.
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ELLE.COM SCHOLARS
The AJC Media scholars program launched in Fall 2016 as a partnership between the Anna Julia Cooper Center and Elle.com This highly competitive journalism program for Wake Forest University undergraduates oered students an opportunity to learn crucial reporting and digital skills while creating content focused on women and girls of color.There was considerable media interest in the program when it launched, including a feature story in Time. Professors Harris-Perry and Williams chose five students from more than fifty applications. Seniors, Lauren Barber, Mankaprr Conteh, Alex Dean, and Ann Nguyen and sophomore Erica Jordan. During the 2016-2017 academic year these five five undergraduate students honed their journalism skills and shape national conversations. The program was a dynamic partnership with ELLE.com, a leading national website that reaches more than a million people daily.
During weekly meetings scholars learned basics of news writing including lead writing, story development and structure and the editing process. Scholars also received training from journalists from top media outlets across the country, Editors from Elle.com also spent a day on campus teaching students about digital journalism. The program aorded scholars several opportunities to travel as a cohort for the purpose of learning field reporting, meeting additional mentors, and gaining valuable contacts including- October 2016, Stanford University for event with Solange and meetings with JS Knight Fellows; December 2016, New York City media trip included meetings with GENDER
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editors at Elle.com, Elle, Essence and BuzzFeed; and January 2017, Washington D.C. for the Trump presidential inauguration and the historic Women’s March.
The program connected scholars with writers and reporters so that they could learn from practitioners in the field during our travels and on campus. Students met authors and journalists Veronica Chambers and Jeff Chang; Stacy-Marie Ishmael, managing editor for mobile BuzzFeed News; and Lewis Wallace, a transgender journalist and former American Public Media Marketplace reporter who was fired for publishing a blog post questioning objectivity in the Trump era. Scholars met with Baratunde Thurston and Questlove during a second NYC trip.
In addition to cohort experiences, scholars were afforded opportunities for individual professional development based on their specific skills, interests, and goals. Senior Mankaprr Conteh spent a day shadowing Essence Magazine’s Features editor Lauren Williams where she practiced pitching and writing news stories for Essence’s audience and learned the lengthy process of editing a feature. Senior Ann Nguyen interviewed comedian Phoebe Robinson and experienced a live podcast on WNYC. Ann also directed and shot video for an interview, later used on Buzzfeed’s Another Round. Senior Lauren Barber attended the 2017 student journalism conference of The Nation, where she met young writers and established editors. Lauren was able to discuss and pitch stories resulted to North Carolina political stories with national outlets.
The work of individual scholars was published in multiple print and digital locations including: Elle.com, Buzzfeed, okayplayer.com, WFU’s Old Gold and Black, The F Bomb.
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ELLE.COM SCHOLARS
In addition to individual bylines, the scholars produced several collective pieces including a well received suggested reading list for those intending to attend the Women's March. This piece was published on Elle.com just prior to the Women’ March in January 2017. The scholars collaborated to create and publish a crowd sourced, multimedia syllabus inspired by the popular album A Seat at the Table, by Solange. The syllabus was very well received and heavily reported. The initial Twitter chat for the launch of the #SeatSyllabus reached nearly 625,000 account users on Twitter.
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ELLE.COM SCHOLARS
The final reporting project of the Elle.com Scholars was an eort to address the movement for #selfcare by launching a new concept of Squad Care- an idea of collective uplift within and among women of color. This first national report on # SquadCare – what it is, why we need it, and how it is related to self-care included in depth reporting on activist communities, black women entertainers, artists, entrepreneurs and healers. Each scholar wrote and reported an individual piece and all were packaged together by Elle.com in a well-regarded and highly successful package in July 2017.
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ELLE.COM SCHOLARS Seniors Lauren Barber and Mankaprr Conteh collaborated to host a Facebook Live event from the Elle.com studios in New York City, earning more than 25,000 viewers to promote the package.
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BLACK ON CAMPUS
In 2018, the Anna Julia Cooper Center launched BLACK ON CAMPUS: a student journalism program of in partnership with The Nation. BLACK ON CAMPUS was an extension of The Nation’s long standing commitment to the education, training, and support of student and emerging journalists. BLACK ON CAMPUS was a national program for ten student journalists at top colleges, universities, and graduate schools. These young writers worked closely with Professors Harris-Perry and Williams to develop professional skills as they documented the experiences of black college students and reported on issues of national consequence to a black college student audience. BLACK ON CAMPUS student journalists met with Dr. HarrisPerry and Dr. Williams in weekly virtual sessions to develop skills, pitch ideas, and craft longterm projects. Student writers traveled to Washington, DC, to Winston-Salem, NC and to New York City where they attended The Nation’s annual Student Journalism Conference at The New School.
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BLACK ON CAMPUS Black on Campus received more than 110 applications from college and graduate students across the country. The ten cohort members were extremely diverse. Two students attended historically black colleges (HBCUs), two students were pursuing graduate degrees, several were from large state universities, several from smaller private liberal schools, and they represented the a broad geographic diversity from Amherst to Arizona State. The student journalists of Black on Campus sought to make visible the unique issues facing black college students. Too often in mainstream media the default student is white, middle class, heterosexual and attending a predominantly white institution. Their reporting helped disrupt this norm. At the same time, black college students aren’t a monolith. They have diverse experiences that vary by region, institution, gender, gender identity and class. Their reporting helped to reveal those complexities and what they mean. These student reporters also documented the experiences of the 21st century black college students by using the talent and lived experience of emerging black student journalists to amplify the voices of black students as storytellers and experts by centering black students as the primary writers of the stories.
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IDA B. WELLS INVESTIGATIVE TRAINING INSTITUTE
In both 2017 and 2018 the the Anna Julia Cooper Center hosted a two day training and professional development program in both beginning and advanced investigative reporting by the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. The Wells society is a news trade organization whose mission is to increase the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of color in the field of investigative reporting. The Society seeks to raise the awareness of, and opportunities for, investigative reporting among journalists of color and to foster the desire for social justice journalism and accountability reporting about racial injustice.
Although there are journalism membership organizations that provide training and skills building for investigative reporting and others that serve as advocates for diversity in newsrooms and media organizations, none of these groups adequately serve journalists of color who are interested in opportunities in investigative reporting. Journalists from Propublica, the Washington Post, and the New York Times made this training available free of charge to Wake Forest students and at low cost to professional journalists in the area as a result of the invitation from the Anna Julia Cooper Center.
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SECTION IV
AMPLIFYING INTERSECTIONAL SCHOLARSHIP GENDER
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ANNA JULIA COOPER ANNUAL LECTURE Each year the Anna Julia Cooper Center hosts an annual lecture for our campus and community. The Anna Julia Cooper Lecture is presented by a distinguished scholar or artist toward the end of February or near the start of March- bridging African American and Women’s History Month celebrations. Each lecturer further engages small groups of students and members of the community. In 2017 the AJC Center added a private roundtable of scholarly experts to assist the Cooper lecturer in preparation of a new working project. The results have been exceptional! This lecture has swiftly emerged as the preeminent intersectional speaker series in the Academe.
2012 Karla Holloway “When Race Matters: Private Bodies, Public Texts” Karla Holloway, retired from Duke University in 2017, as the James B. Duke professor of English. She was the first African-American dean of the humanities and social sciences and the first African American woman chair of Duke’s appointment, promotion and tenure committee. She is also the founding co-director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Professor Holloway is the author of eight books.
2013 Julianne Malveaux “Slipping Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Females” Julianne Malveaux is a labor economist, noted author, and public commentator on issues of race, culture, gender, and their economic impacts. Dr. Malveaux has long been recognized for her progressive and insightful observations. Dr. Malveaux has been a contributor to academic life since receiving her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1980. She has been on the faculty or visiting faculty of multiple prestigious institutions. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics at Boston College. She served as the15th President of Bennett College for Women.
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ANNA JULIA COOPER ANNUAL LECTURE 2014, Joan Morgan “Hip Hop at 40” Joan Morgan is an American author and award winning journalist completing a PhD in American Studies at New York University. She has taught at The New School, Duke University, Vanderbilt, and Stanford University. Morgan is especially known for her work in the field of “hip-hop feminism,” a term she coined in her 1999 book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Her AJC Lecture was connected to the groundbreaking Gender, Race, and Sexuality Conference hosted by AJC Center.
2015, Jennifer Eberhardt “Protecting and Policing Black Lives in the 21st Century” A social psychologist at Stanford University, Jennifer Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice. Jennifer Eberhardt received a B.A. (1987) from the University of Cincinnati, an A.M. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) from Harvard University. From 1995 to 1998 she taught at Yale University in the Departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1998, and is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology and co-director of SPARQ, a university initiative to use social psychological research to address pressing social problems.
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ANNA JULIA COOPER ANNUAL LECTURE 2016, Barbara Ransby “From Black Power to Black Lives Matter: Mapping The Terrain of The Black Freedom Movement” Barbara Ransby is an historian, writer and longtime activist. She is a Distinguished Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she directs the campus-wide Social Justice Initiative. She previously served as Director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and Interim Vice Provost for Planning and Programs (2011 -2012) at UIC. Prof. Ransby is author of the highly acclaimed biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. The book received eight national awards and recognitions including Lillian Smith Book Award, Southern Regional Council; Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association; Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Association of Black Women Historians; Liberty Legacy Foundation Award (co-winner), Organization of American Historians; James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; Honorable Mention, 2004 Berkshire Conference First Book Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.
2017, Monique Morris “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools” Monique W. Morris, Ed.D. is an award-winning author and social justice scholar with nearly three decades of experience in the areas of education, civil rights, juvenile and social justice. Dr. Morris is the author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (The New Press, 2016), Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2014), and Too Beautiful for Words (MWM Books, 2012). She worked with Kemba Smith on her book, Poster Child: The Kemba Smith Story (IBJ Book Publishing, 2011) and has written dozens of articles, book chapters, and other publications on social justice issues and lectured widely on research, policies, and practices associated with improving juvenile justice, educational, and socioeconomic conditions for Black girls, women, and their families.
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ANNA JULIA COOPER ANNUAL LECTURE 2018 Brittney Cooper “Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women” Brittney Cooper is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is co-founder of the popular Crunk Feminist Collective blog. And she is a contributing writer for Cosmopolitan.com and a former contributor to Salon.com. Her cultural commentary has been featured in multiple media outlets. Dr. Cooper is co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection (The Feminist Press 2017). She is author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, May 2017) and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s, February 2018).
Professor Cooper’s 2018 lecture was a remarkable historical marker for the AJC Center because Dr. Cooper is a scholar of Anna Julia Cooper for who the center is named. In Beyond Respectability she generates a theory of the Anna Julia Cooperian approach to intellectual inquiry grounded in the work of black women who operated as agents of social change and academic inquiry. At its founding in 2012, few knew the name Anna Julia Cooper. The center’s seventh annual lecturer is a scholar whose tenure was earned, in part, due to her research and theoretical contributions surrounding Anna Julia Cooper. It has been extraordinary to experience this seismic shift in the Academe in such a short time.
During her visit to Wake Forest, Professor Cooper appeared along with Professor Harris-Perry on the Left of Black hosted by Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal.
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SCHOLAR STUDENT CONNECTIONS
In 2017, undergraduate scholar, Mankaprr Conteh met and interviewed AJC lecturer, Dr. Monique Morris for WFDD radio. Conteh connected her experiences as a City Year intern to Morris’s research, and writing.
“If I could be a City Year intern again, I would recognize that some, if not most, of the twenty little black girls I taught were hurting. I wouldn’t forget that statistics say 12 of them were survivors of sexual abuse. That 11 of them had at least one incarcerated parent. That eight of them were in foster care. I wouldn’t forget the social ills that were manifesting in my classroom.”
Dr. Morris was so impressed by her interactions with Mankaprr, she asked her to coauthor the Foreword to the paperback edition of her award winning book. GENDER
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2017 AJC lecturer, Dr. Monique Morris, embracing Dr. Karla Holloway, the inaugural AJC speaker.
*Credit Ann Thuy Nguyen
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NEWSLETTER & SOCIAL MEDIA
AJC Center Twitter: 8,307 Followers
AJC Center Instagram: 1220 Followers
AJC CenterFacebook: 2,538 Followers
In 2015, the Anna Julia Cooper Center launched a weekly newsletter highlighting five stories, articles, or research reports addressing scholarship, news, or policy issues at the intersections of gender, race, and place. Currently the newsletter has more than 4000 subscribers. The newsletter is a critical resource for amplifying the work of the center, our affiliated researchers, and for supporting intersectional work across the country. The newsletter significantly increases AJC Center’s national presence and impact.
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SYLLABUS PROJECT In 2016 the Anna Julia Cooper Center crafted, disseminated and amplified original syllabi around organized intersectional issues with special interest to broaden American political conversations. We made these syllabi publicly available for free download through our Anna Julia Cooper Center website. The syllabus project had a broad audience for ideas. We discovered many people had a deep interest in issues of gender, race, and politics, wanted to know more, but often don't know where to look and who to trust. The Anna Julia Cooper Center curation was a valuable source for many.
The Anna Julia Cooper Center took an active role curating the October 2016, Welfare Reform Syllabus. In order to encourage a more informed public debate around the impact and effectiveness of PRWORA, and to challenge dominant myths around welfare with evidence-based research, poverty scholars from all around the nation came together to create the #WelfareReformSyllabus.
The Syllabus covers key themes:
● The history of welfare as a New Deal program designed to keep women out of the labor force to raise their children, which largely excluded women of color until the 1960s, when the welfare rights movement broke open access to public assistance;
● The racial politics of the backlash against welfare where it was framed as program that coddled ‘lazy’ and ‘dependent’ women of color;
● The realities of pre-1996 welfare use (most recipients were white, had worked or were working,
used welfare to escape domestic violence or economic crisis, and got off welfare in less than 2 years);
● And the context of the legislation within the rise of neoliberal austerity policies and the criminalization of poor people.
The Center also worked to amplify and make available the several other syllabi including the Black Women’s Disability Syllabus, the Lemonade Syllabus, The Ferguson Syllabus and the Charlottesville Syllabus.
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CURRICULUM SECTION V
Credit Ann Thuy Nguyen
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AJC CENTER IN THE CLASSROOM Since its founding The Anna Julia Cooper Center has made its mark on campus through the classroom. Founding director Melissa Harris-Perry is an innovative and dedicated teacher, bringing an intersectional lens, rigorous preparation, and enthusiastic engagement to the classroom. Associate Director Dani Parker-Moore is a gifted educator deeply committed to expanding opportunities for students in college classrooms and in the entire K-12 educational journey. The courses taught by Anna Julia Cooper Center faculty and postdoctoral fellows have altered the landscape of the university and the trajectories of many students touched by these courses.
Melissa Harris-Perry Introduction to American Politics
Introduction to African American Politics
America’s First Ladies
The Politics of Motherhood
Race, Class, and Social Justice
Black Women’s Political Activism
Girls Stories
Black Lives Matter
Wake the Vote
Dani Parker-Moore Teaching Diverse Learners Girls Stories Wake the Vote Professional Experiences in Education Education Policy & Practice
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AJC CENTER IN THE CLASSROOM Jaira Harrington
Race and Politics in Brazil
First Year Seminar
Global Feminisms
Black Lives Matter
Sherri Williams
Race, Gender, and Media,
Rhetoric of Social Activism
Two master’s thesis committees
Independent study adviser
“I taught students (undergraduate and graduates) about how global dominant ideologies and systems of power oppress marginalized people and affect how those groups are portrayed in the media. Students also learned how imperialism, colonialism, genocide, racism, heteropatriarchy, sexism, ableism and other power systems affect people’s life chances and media portrayals. I also taught them media theories and concepts such as agenda setting, framing, cultivation, stereotyping, spiral of silence and political economy so they will understand the forces that lead to absences and silences in media portrayals. Groups and issues I taught include AfricanAmericans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Indians (Southeast Asia), religion, women, the LGBT community, people with disabilities and socioeconomic class. Students were required to create media content that fuses their practical communication skills and the media diversity skills they acquire in this class.” —Dr. Sherri Williams
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SUMMER READING
Each summer, AJC Center has supported student-led reading groups meeting to discuss scholarly texts written by women of color. During orientation AJC Center participates by hosting a reading group for incoming freshman through Project Wake choosing texts like Bad Feminist, Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, and Crunk Feminist Collective.
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GIRLS’ STORIES COURSE In Spring 2017 Professors Harris-Perry and Parker-Moore jointly taught Girl Stories: Race, Politics, and Pedagogy. Students in the course encountered the accounts of girls and young women with an eye toward understanding how these stories are used as tools of politics and pedagogy. The allowed students to critically engage a wide range of scholarly and literary texts addressing the lives of girls and young women living with marginal racial or ethnic identities or in marginal linguistic communities. Because many of these girls and young women endure additional vulnerabilities, reading these texts helped students understand and critically analyze how intersectional identities influence life experiences. Dr. Harris-Perry was honored with a national Girls Write Now Award for this course.
Addy: American Girl
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming
(R)evolution: The Girls Write Now 2016 Anthology
Monique Morris. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools.
Piyali Bhattacharya Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion
Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family Amani Al-Khatahbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age
Esmeralda Santiago. When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir
STUDENT RESPONSE
FINAL ASSIGNMENT You are co-teaching a summer program for middle school girls in Winston-Salem. There are two teachers in the class. Together the two of you have 30 students ranging in age from 11 to 14-years-old. The girls are a racially diverse group. There are African-American, Latina, East and South Asian American, and white girls in the class. Some students speak only English and some speak multiple languages. All students are American citizens, but some are in recent immigrant families and some are in mixedstatus families.. During these 6 weeks you and your coteacher will need to keep the students busy and learning from 10AM until 3pm. Use the stories of girls or young women of color as the primary structure for organizing the six week lessons plan for this summer program.
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“I was working on this project at a coffee shop in my hometown -a super homogenous/white/Christian town. I was working on it with my little sister who is adopted from Guatemala. She was totally intrigued. She said "as a hispanic girl in an all white town I wish we had something like this in my school." She also opened up to me how difficult it was to be one of the only girls of color in her middle school; a struggle we have definitely never talked about before. Cool to see that the lessons we are learning in class are totally applicable elsewhere--she yearns for a way to share her personal adoption story with anyone who will listen. Thanks for a fantastic semester; this was definitely one of the more transformative, enlightening classes of my time at Wake so far.” PLACE
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AJC CENTER BEYOND THE CLASSROOM The Anna Julia Cooper Center wholeheartedly believes in the transformative power of educational experiences occurring beyond the classroom. Learning moves to new levels when faculty and students engage with one another, with our communities, and with our nation. Since our founding the AJC Center has made significant resource commitments to ensure diverse cohorts of students have opportunities for travel and engagement in unique locations and with critical thought leaders.
In Spring 2015 AJC Center took two graduating seniors on research trip to Washington, DC. to meet with leaders of the Council on Women & Girls at the White House, the staff of the nonprofit organization United We Dream, and U.S. Representative Alma Adams. Students attended and met with the presenters at the National Archives event “Women in Civil Rights Leadership.” Students also visited the MSNBC studios and participated in the production process for the show “Melissa Harris-Perry.” During Summer 2015 two undergraduate students completed community-engaged research internships. One student partnered with the Diaper Bank of North Carolina for a public policy-focused internship. He assisted with data preparation for a major grant, developed evaluation measures for partner organizations, and managed a political awareness campaign. The second student partnered with the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies in New Orleans to conduct research and assist in the production of the second edition of a publication. She visited New Orleans, aided in conducting a focus group, completed and transcribed multiple interviews, and produced final materials for the organization. In Spring 2016 the AJC Center brought a group of 10 undergraduate students to a White House Young Women’s Leadership event in Washington, DC. The AJC Center also brought two students to the White House United State of Women conference in Washington, DC. Both of these offered professional development, mentoring, and networking opportunities for the students. In Spring 2017 AJC Center took two senior research fellows to New York City to participate in the American’s Promise Summit for America’s Future. “I look back on this day and realize I learned so much in those meetings, often surrounded by brilliant, impactful women of color… I saw women and men who looked like me changing our nation- every single one of them. I saw myself in every single space I inhabited and now I see my future revolving around and interacting with those spaces.”
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AJC CENTER BEYOND THE CLASSROOM Not only does the Anna Julia Cooper Center take our students to encounter learning beyond campus, we also bring the world to campus for the enrichment of our students. Over the years we have hosted and co-hosted dozens of speakers and symposiums beyond our slated programming. Some of the most impactful and best attended events are mentioned below.
2013, Diane Nash,
2016, Conversation with the Mothers of the Movement
2015, Kevin Cokley,
“The Myth of Black Anti-Intellectualism”
2017, “Reckoning and Resistance:
A Discussion with the Co-Chairs of the Women’s March”
“A Conversation”
2016, Mychal Denzel Smith,
“Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching”
2017, “School Saved My Life, Can we Save Schools A Conversation with Obama’s Secretary of Education John King”
2016, “Power, Protest, and Patriotism”
Olympian John Carlos and Journalist Dave Zirin
2017, Organizing in the New Political Reality: A Conversation with Black Lives Matter CoFounder Alicia Garza
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CONFERENCES SECTION VI
The Anna Julia Cooper Center routinely hosts conferences and gatherings. We collect notes, recommendations, and critical insights that emerge from these gatherings and synthesize them to contribute to a larger research agenda on women and girls of color. Our conferences allow researchers to connect with other scholars, collaborate on research topics and share best practices for research going forward. GENDER
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2013 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND HIP HOP The Anna Julia Cooper Project hosted a groundbreaking national conference on gender, sexuality and hip hop at Tulane University December 5-6, 2013, bringing together scholars, students, artists, and activists for an intensive series of discussions focused on the contemporary challenges and opportunities at the intersections of race, gender, sex, politics, and artistry.
REFLECTION BY CONFERENCE PRESENTER, TIARA PHALON, POET, ACTIVIST, EDUCATOR AND MEMBER OF BYP 100. I sought to create a video that showcased different female MCs, some rappers & some poets, and to create a metaphor around women “waging war against sexism in hip hop.” It was a risk to introduce a video with gun toting female vigilantes in an academic space. I figured that Hip Hop itself is not always pretty; that was the reason we were convening in the first place, and that sometimes you have to dance the line to get the attention of various audiences. I hoped that in the end they all would embrace the metaphor. At the time I didn’t know there was such a thing as hip-hop feminism, that I was participating in a movement created by Joan Morgan. A weekend with Melissa Harris-Perry (MHP) and her super friends would only further my understanding of this.
We continued our discussion around rape culture in hip hop with a video from rapper Too Short, who gives an instructional on how to “turn girls out” –by taking control of her mind & body by coercion or force. We directly correlated pimp culture to rape culture. After the video there was a sadness that swept the room like a tsunami. There was an uneasiness that lingered that could not be addressed with mere conversation. I offered to do a libation, which is an African tradition with the pouring of water that acknowledges the ancestors and recognizes the spirits of those gone before you. With the assistance of Jazz Hudson we poured libation for all those who have experienced sexual violence and for the men and women who have compromised their souls participating in such acts. Water was poured, some cried, and slowly but surely the uneasiness lifted. A woman from South Africa approached me after and said, “I was surprised because I did not know Black Americans did Libation.” We ended with a chant “Chant down Babylon, Wo-men are the bomb, We’re Ready, We’re Coming!”
I know that there are many gems to take away from this experience.
1. MHP showed me what it means to be a humble giant that reserves the right to check a fool should he step out of line. Sometimes you meet women who you admire and you feel like an ant standing next to them, but MHP makes you taller in her presence and we need more of that in the world.
2. There will always be a need for conversation and community building amongst generations of black women, and whether we agree to disagree we will be stronger in the end.
3. For the plight of women and the black community we must always remember that the combination of academia, art and acknowledgement of the soul together is the remedy that will elevate our people.
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2015 GENDER HEALTH AND THE SOUTH
The Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University and the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University co-hosted three events over three years addressing the politics of health at the intersections of gender, race, and region. On April 16 and 17, the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University and the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University joined for a day and a half symposium at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The symposium brought together activists, scholars, and students to present original research and raise questions at the intersection of gender, race, region, and health. The symposium included research presentations by AJC Center undergraduate research fellows and keynote addresses by Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry and Dr. Jonathan Metzl. Panel topics included: the social foundations of health; HIV, sexuality, and health care; pregnancy and reproductive justice; community based health initiatives, and practicing equitable health care.
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2015 ADVANCING EQUITY FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS OF COLOR
On Friday, November 13, 2015, the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University and the White House Council on Women and Girls co-hosted the day-long conference "Advancing Equity for Women and Girls of Color: A Research Agenda for the Next Decade.� The conference, hosted at the Obama White House, featured stakeholders from the academic, private, government and philanthropic sectors who are committed to increasing opportunity and empowerment for women and girls of color and their peers.
The summit covered a range of issues including economic development, healthcare, criminal justice, vulnerability to violence, hip-hop, and images of women in media. In addition, more that 40 speakers and panelists participated including: Valerie Jarrett, White House Council on Women and Girls, Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney General, Tina Tchen, White House Council on Women and Girls, Cecilia MuĂąoz, White House Domestic Policy Council, Rogan Kersh, Provost, Wake Forest University, Melissa Harris-Perry, Professor, Wake Forest University and Teresa Younger, Ms. Foundation.
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The conference was livestreamed by the White House website and its hashtag #YesSheCan trended nationally on twitter during the 8 hours of the conference. The White House wrote about the conference in a piece entitled “Expanding Opportunities for Women and Girls of Color.” Several White House principals spoke at the event, including Tina Tchen, Valerie Jarrett, Loretta Lynch, and Cecilia Munoz. The event generated significant media attention including substantive articles in outlets not limited to America Magazine, BET News, The Root, The Grio, Indian Country Today Media Network, The Nation, The National Journal, NBC News, Philanthropy News Digest, USA Today, and The Washington Post.
During the remaining years of the Obama administration the White House Council on Women and Girls maintained a publicly supportive relationship of the Anna Julia Cooper Center by providing opportunities for the students associated with the center and by inviting the leadership of the center to participate in high profile events. For example, the Council invited the AJC Center to bring 20 students and affiliated researchers to the to United State of Women conference in 2016. This conference included remarks by all major White House principals including President Obama, First Lady Obama, Vice President Biden, Valerie Jarrett, Tina Tchen, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
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2016 KNOW HER TRUTHS
Extending the work and deepening the relationships of the White House conference in November 2015, the Anna Julia Cooper Center hosted a second national conference during the 2015-2016 academic year. On April 29-30, 2016, the Anna Julia Cooper Center brought an unprecedented convening to the campus of Wake Forest University focused on the lives of women and girls of color. The conference brought together scholars, students, community organizations, researchers, policy makers, foundations, and activists for an intensive series of discussions about the circumstances, challenges, and opportunities facing women and girls of color.
This conference was part of an initiative to develop a meaningful research agenda on women and girls of color. Conversations addressed what we know about the lives of women and girls of color, the deficits in our knowledge, and the meaningful ways in which increased knowledge about the lives of women and girls of color can influence our policy and political landscape. What should a national research agenda for women and girls of color include? How do we include multi-sector partners? How do we establish models of accountable, community-based research? How do communities, policy makers, foundations, and other representatives access research to aect change?
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Know Her Truths featured more than 25 presentations and panels over the course of two days addressing issues including school discipline disparities, gun violence, farmworker women, media representation, reproductive justice, the sexual assault-to-prison pipeline, and STEM careers. Many organization leaders and top researchers attended and presented at the event. The two-day conference trended nationally on Twitter and was live streamed to a national audience. The first day of the conference focused on specific topics and the research landscape and deficits in those areas. The second day of the conference focused on models of research and research translation. Provost Kersh addressed the conference and White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett sent a video thanking the Center for its work.
After opening the conference on the first day, Professor Harris-Perry departed for Washington, DC where she oered expert testimony for the establishment of the first ever Congressional Caucus for Black Girls and Women. She then returned to Winston-Salem to rejoin the conference on the second day. The establishment of the congressional caucus and the role played by Professor Harris-Perry in its establishment is further evidence of the Anna Julia Cooper Center’s historic accomplishments.
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2018 KNOW HER TRUTHS
The Anna Julia Cooper Center of Wake Forest University hosted the second bi-annual Know Her Truths. The conference was from March 22-23 and at Wake Forest University. Know Her Truths was a two-day exploration of three truths central to the lives of women and girls of color.
Truth 1: She survives systems This truth explored three interlocking public systems that have demonstrable, inequitable eects on the lives of girls and women of color. This track addressed inequality in public and higher education, in foster care, and in criminal justice.
Truth 2: She transcends binaries This truth explored the ways intersectional identities, especially queer, trans, disability and undocumented identities shapes the lived experiences of girls and women of color.
Truth 3: She leads and liberates This truth explored the political leadership of women and girls of color both in elected oďŹƒce and in movement leadership with special attention to questions of multiracial feminist coalitions of women of color and intergenerational issues.
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MAJOR INITIATIVES SECTION VII
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FREEDOM SCHOOL Founded in 1995 by the Children’s Defense Fund, Freedom Schools® program is a direct service initiative which provides summer options for children while strengthening parent and community involvement in the year-round achievement of children. Freedom Schools® at Wake Forest University serves children ages third through fifth grade for six weeks and integrates reading, conflict resolution, and social action in an activity-based curriculum that promotes social, cultural, and historical awareness. Responding to alarming statistics indicating substantial gaps in educational and economic access for third graders in Forsyth County, the Anna Julia Cooper Center hosted an innovative Children's Defense Fund Freedom School site in 2017. The program operates at Wake Forest University for six weeks from late June to early August to offer grade school students daily access to a college campus that is too frequently experienced as inhospitable by many in the low income communities of color in our city. AJC Freedom School directly serves 50 students from third to fifth grades. In summer 2017 we supported the capacity for another 100 students in two additional Winston-Salem sites. AJC Freedom school is available to families at no cost and serves students enrolled in 20 different schools across Forsyth county. In summer 2017, there were 30+ students on a waiting list. AJC Center Freedom School site was unique for several reasons.
Feeding Program: Recognizing the food insecurity need in our community, The AJC Center Freedom School partnered with Campus Kitchen to provide two freshly prepared, nutritious meals daily to students. Campus Kitchen, as a sponsor in the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), served two nutritious meals each day. Many summer camps rely on prepackaged meals. Instead, we were able to provide nutritious food, a cornerstone of the Freedom School model. Examples included oatmeal with berries, eggs and sausage with fresh fruit, grits bowls, fresh vegetables with grilled chicken, pasta with sauce and mixed vegetables.
Vista Summer Associates Program: The Corporation for National and Community Service(CNCS) acknowledging the need to provide academic support and encouragement at-risk children need to thrive. CNCS also aimed to place college students from underrepresented backgrounds in community services opportunities. The mission of CNCS aligned with the mission of Freedom School. Through this partnership we were able to place 6 college students who worked as classroom teachers for AJC Center Freedom School. They were primarily young people with financial need as well. We partnered with CNCS to additionally provide seven additional Vista Summer Associates to two additional Freedom School Sites within the Winston Salem area to also serve as classroom teachers. Our partnership with Americorps VISTA allowed AJC to fully staff an additional Freedom School site, serving an additional 50 student in Winston-Salem. Building capacity across multiple sites represents the larger vision of work we hope to accomplish, building both our programming and the ability of our partners to program and build in their own spaces.
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Piedmont Regional: AJC Center played a central role establishing multiple Freedom School sites by working with community stakeholders, including: non-profit leaders, teachers, principals, professors, university administrators, volunteers and parents, to engage in innovative ways to implement Freedom School sites across the city. Capacity building acknowledges our role as a partner, rather than competitor with our community. Social Justice Orientation: Ninety percent of students in the AJC Center Freedom School received free or reduced lunch during the school year. On the national day of social action, the students lead a march to city hall and presented the Mayor of Winston-Salem with stories of their own experiences of hunger, local and national statistics about childhood hunger, and advocated for support of federal SNAP benefits. This social justice orientation was infused in every aspect of AJC’s Freedom School, seeking to empower students by linking their experiences, efficacy, and cultural practices to literacy practices.
Students completed a pre and post test indicator of reading skills. On average, participation in the AJC Center Freedom School lead to a five month reading gain in instructional reading levels. The overwhelming majority (79%) of scholars maintained or gained in instructional reading levels. Parents surveys indicate that parents perceived positive changes in their child’s social and academic confidence. Parents also reported that they were willing to participate in social action as well as child’s school work.
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COLLABORATIVE TO ADVANCE EQUITY THROUGH RESEARCH The Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research is a voluntary affiliation of institutions in the United States committed to taking meaningful action to support and improve research addressing the lives of women and girls of color. The Anna Julia Cooper Center has committed to acting as an administrator of the Collaborative through 2020.
Research about women and girls of color is still marginal, can be diďŹƒcult to access, and is insuďŹƒciently integrated into policy-making processes. This research deficit has meaningful consequences for the lives of women and girls of color. Addressing that deficit requires the partnership and commitment of a wide coalition. Collaborative members make commitments to and invest resources in research at their own institution over the next five years, and work collaboratively with other members to build new connections, share promising practices, and support the advancement of research addressing the lives of women and girls of color.
In November of 2015, the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University partnered with the White House Council on Women and Girls to organize a conference emphasizing the crucial importance of research as a tool for advancing gender and racial equity in our democracy. The conference sought to communicate an imperative to substantively invest in this work and those who do it in order to address current research deficits, ask new questions, and support the communities who policymakers seek to assist.
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At that conference, the Anna Julia Cooper Center, first announced the formation of the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research. Initially 24 institutions made a commitment of $18 million extended through 2020 to support and advance research at their own institutions to address the lives of women and girls of color and women of color as researchers. Now in its third year, the Collaborative has grown to 55 members with more than $75 million in aggregated, institution-based commitments. These dollars are not a grant or gift distributed across member institutions; these are commitments by the institutions to set aside resources for the purpose of investing in this work.
As the current institutional administrator of the Collaborative to Advance Equity, the Anna Julia Cooper Center hosted monthly conference calls with Collaborative members, traveled to various Collaborative sponsored events, and produced a report highlighting the accomplishments and research of member organizations. A few of the highlights are indicated below.
The Center for Medicine Health and Society at Vanderbilt University established a professorship in the area of intersectionality, inequality, and health/mental health.
The Century Foundation has committed substantial resources to the study of race and gender in American schools, producing several field defining reports on the topic in the past three years.
The University of Connecticut produces its own annual report updating the work of the collaborative on its campus, including co-sponsored lectures, post-doctoral fellows and policy eorts with both local and national impact.
The Hutchins Institute at Harvard University has established a residential fellow to the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute whose work focuses on the representation and/or lived experience of women and girls of color.
NC State University established GROW-Growing Research On Women of color (GROW) Project, recruiting researchers from all disciplines to participate in a national initiative aimed at increasing research that focuses on women and girls of color.
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RESOURCES SECTION VIII
*Credit Ann Thuy Nguyen
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RESOURCES During most of its existence the Anna Julia Cooper Center has never had more than one full time, professional staff member. The accomplishments of the center have come almost entirely from the sheer will of a small group of women and fems, many of whom are women of color, and some who live with disabilities. The financial resources of the AJC Center are small and its operating budget has been declining each year since 2014 despite efforts by the small team to write sustaining grants to support our work. In recent years more philanthropic dollars have been directed toward work benefiting women and girls. We are hopeful about this trend.
Ms. Foundation 2016 and 2018 Award: $20,000 and $10,000 Know Her Truths Conferences The Ms, Foundation is the sole national philanthropic organization supporting the work of the Anna Julia Cooper Center. Their steadfast support has been foundational to the Center’s survival.
Hearst/ Elle.com 2016-2017 Gift: $15,000 Support of the ELLE.com Scholars program. NOTE: This gift was made possible because Melissa Harris-Perry chose to forgo $15,000 in salary during 2016 and have the funds directed to the center for the purpose of supporting the Elle Scholars. This was not a preexisting grant program.
The Nation Magazine Spring 2018 Gift: $10,000 Support of BLACK on CAMPUS program. NOTE: This is not a preexisting grant program. Dr. Harris-Perry and Dr. Williams sought out this support through active engagement of media industry.
Melissa Harris-Perry 2015-2018 Gifts: Approximately $75,000
Professor Melissa Harris-Perry has supported the work of the Anna Julia Cooper Center by diverting proceeds from lecture honoraria directly to the center.
Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation $46,000 for 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 Academic Years
The AJC Center collaborated with Bennett College on a grant from Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation that successfully secured $46,000 for Bennett College students to participate in the AJC Center Research Fellows program. NOTE: These funds did not offset any expenses or costs at AJC Center. These were used exclusively for the support of Bennett students.
National Science Foundation 2016 Amount: $122,210 for 2016 through 2021
Vanderbilt University, Fisk University, and Wake Forest University will collaborate to develop, study and refine a model to recruit, retain and advance historically underrepresented minority (URM) women from doctoral degree attainment to postdoctoral fellowship to tenured track positions in STEM. NOTE: These funds do not offset operating costs at AJC Center. They have no impact on the overall budget and have little effect on our capacity for core programming.
Freedom School Summer 2017 and Summer 2018 Gifts: Private donations approximately $67,190 Americorp VISTA: $21,700 USDA Summer Feeding Grant: $13,556 GENDER
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Many of the photos throughout this report are the work of Ann Thuy Nguyen (WFU Class of 2017) Ann was a 2016-2017 Elle.com scholar with the Anna Julia Cooper Center. We are grateful for her artistry and integrity in capturing the work of the center.
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It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. --Anna Julia Cooper
*Credit Ann Thuy Nguyen
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