Wellness and Care in Today's World: An interview with CLR Faculty Fellow, Dr. Symone Johnson

Interview conducted by Yamitza Yuivar Villarreal

Dr. Symone A. Johnson is Assistant Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University. Dr. Johnson earned a Ph.D. (2022) and an M.A. (2019) in Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame. Following Black anthropological tradition and Black feminist theories, Dr. Johnson focuses on modern personal healing practices, communal care, and the development of restorative and healing justice frameworks. In this conversation, we discussed her work for the CLR Faculty Fellowship, “Reintegration as a Sacred Political Project,” which allowed her to continue ethnographic work in New York and analyze how people mediate their experiences and spirituality with different worlds of care and political activism.

I was born in Cincinnati and grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where my little brother and sister were born. I spent a lot of time down there and really enjoyed myself growing up in a big family. I grew up in a very, I would say, spiritual and religious home, involved in the southern Black Baptist tradition. I was very involved in the creative arts as well. Before I became interested in anything related to research, I wanted to be a performer. I enjoy singing, acting, and dancing. I really wanted to be on Broadway. And then I went to college in Atlanta, Spelman College, a historically Black women's college, which was crucial for my social, creative, and intellectual development. I earned a degree in psychology after a meandering road of different majors and career aspirations I started in biology because my mom wanted me to do something more practical and I was being steered away from doing something more creative and artistic. So of course, I went the total opposite way and was like “okay, I'll be an MD, I love Grey's Anatomy.”

Then I made my way to psychology, and, during that time, I was still involved in the creative arts because I worked in the Fine Arts Museum on-campus. I got some experience doing museum education and curatorial studies which was really formative as an educator. That's when I started to think of myself as someone who could teach people things. So not only was I fulfilling my curiosities as a creative person and as an intellectual, but I was engaging with people in a community around ideas like wellness, but also identity and self-representation, which became important themes in my research later on.

Dr. Symone Johnson

I decided to go to grad school, and I wanted to become a counselor because my mom was a counselor, and I was really interested and oriented towards care work and service work in general. I thought that was what I wanted to do. I worked as a research assistant and became aware of the world of academia. Long story short, I met a mentor in my senior year. Being introduced to anthropology at a Black women's college from a Black perspective was really important because I left my undergraduate experience believing that anthropology is Black, obviously knowing the history, but there is a clear Black tradition here. Despite the colonial history of the field, there's also this decolonial approach that can be taken that has been practiced with African and Indigenous people before there was a declared field of anthropology. It's truly a practice of storytelling, of cultural preservation. And I carry that philosophy with me as I do my research and my own teaching. I decided to take that route and attended the University of Notre Dame for my PhD. I worked with Alex Chavez, who was my dissertation chair, an ethnomusicologist from West Texas. We're both Texas folk interested in culture and music. He was really helpful in developing my class consciousness, my Marxian analysis, and also introduced me to critical theory in a particular way. I also worked with Vania Smith-Oka, Maurizio Albahari, and Ashanté Reese, who was my mentor at Spelman.

What is your CLR Faculty Fellowship project focused on? What are you hoping to accomplish during the fellowship year?

I have returned to the field site where I was working for my dissertation research, Brooklyn, New York. My dissertation was about how people connect their political interests with their spiritual commitments. In a way, it really tapped into those curiosities that I've been developing my entire life. How do people's spirituality and religious backgrounds inform their political activism? How does that political work and how engaging with others in community doing political work, transform oneself spiritually as well? It’s like a feedback loop that is cyclical I chose New York as a site because it's a place where creative people go It's a place that, at the time, when I was there in 2018-2019, was a hub for the wellness industry and also the wellness industrial complex, which I critique heavily in my writing. Both of those things come together in a really unique way.

I was working with a mystical school that is a space where healers, educators, and people who are interested in spiritual work and healing work can come and develop their skills. They offer classes for people in the community like training courses, Reiki, Tarot, or other forms of energy work. I'm a part of a cohort now that is developing a philosophy around social ecology, and how we can inform our teaching and our activism with an ecological consciousness.

This fellowship allowed me to return to Brooklyn after a long hiatus and check out the scope of things in person because I've been doing a lot of this work digitally for the last few years, especially since Covid, which happened right at the end of my graduate training. This was my first time being able to go back and actually talk and connect with people in person. It was a really unique experience to go and see the change that had taken place since the last time I'd been there, not only in the geographic landscape, but also in the wellness landscape. And that really informs the writing that is ultimately going to come out of this. I'm developing an article that I'm hoping to find a publishing venue for in the next couple of weeks to months.

Your research centers on restorative and healing justice. What are the roles of personal and collective practice of care in battles against social injustice?

I do a lot of writing about that. How personal wellness is connected to interpersonal wellness, to community wellness, and we can scale that up to the political level. How do we govern ourselves in a way that is attentive to all of our well-being collectively? The only way we can know what is right for the collective is to be tapped into what is right for ourselves at the level of the individual. And that's why I always talk about this idea of “fragmented bodies,” because, in this moment of late-stage capitalism, of the commodified body, it is something I think about a lot, especially as a Black woman, whose function in the United States has historically been to use my body to serve and, in that way, seen. We're all seen as these flesh bags. It's like we have mechanized the body in a particular way that has affected the way we see ourselves. It's affected the way that we heal within the medical industrial complex. So, attending to our healing and our care in a way that is holistic, tied to spiritual well-being, tied to relationships, is really important and allows us to relate to one another in a way that is responsible and acknowledges we're a part of a whole, and not only like a human whole, but a whole that includes the environment and other forms of life, which is where that spiritual aspect comes in.

Many people are struggling with feelings like anxiety, anger, and fear due to the current political situation. How can we approach wellness in this context?

I've been thinking a lot about this. And I think the other side of wellness is having a really deep relationship with grief. Wellness and healing are not always about getting better and better That is a false notion Wellness and healing are an ebb and flow, and I think that there has to be an acknowledgement that there is death and violence in the world. Premature death, natural death, death and destruction of the environment around us, displacement. All of those things are taking place. Genocide. I think we have to grieve all the loss around us. We lived through a pandemic where a million plus people died and many of us are affected by that. And it's something that goes unacknowledged at the social level, at a broader cultural level. This disassociation from death, this, I guess fear of death, fear to acknowledge it, prevents us from actually being able to heal, and live and thrive.

So, a healing practice has to include grief practice at a personal level. That's why African and Indigenous traditions have a lot of rituals and practices around connecting with our ancestors. Because we know that death is not the end. We know that our ancestors live among us, that there is spiritual work that must be done. That is a necessary part. So, the distress that we're all feeling can activate us towards something better, if we allow ourselves to hold space for the grief. And there are things that we can do to create a world that is better for us right now, we can tap into that mutual aid work, we can tap into that political education and the organizing in our local communities.

The power that's currently winning, the power that's based in fear and greed, is not the power that's going to ultimately win. We have to tap into a power that is fueled by love for oneself, love for each other, and love for justice.

You have been doing ethnographic and oral history projects. What impact does including these personal accounts and approaches like black storytelling have in studies about social transformation?

When we think about social change, we can talk a lot, at the level of theory, about what is wrong with our society, which is useful to know what we're facing. It's useful to know that we are in an imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal society. And it's important to understand how our intersectional identities mediate our experiences within that. I think it's another thing to be able to connect with each other at the level of the heart. And storytelling allows us to see the ways that we relate to people who on the outside, seem different from us. It's a way for us to also be able to see that we're not crazy, we're having these shared experiences. And it also allows us to develop a sense of empathy and a sense of mutual regard for one another, which is something that I write about. In restorative justice philosophy, one of the common beliefs is that the more you get to know somebody, the harder it becomes to do harm to them and when you do that harm, which does inevitably happen, we're more willing to repair that harm.

My students always come to me and ask, “we see the problems of the world; they seem so big.” And they are, indeed. But I always say, “you're only responsible for what is around you.” If we all take on what's happening at the local level, then we can all be doing well It's all about just getting to know one's neighbors, repairing those generational conflicts within one's family, talking with classmates about intellectual conflicts that you're having within the classroom. That's where the real revolutionary work is happening. However, your spiritual commitment looks to you, takes assessment of your values and beliefs. Start there. The power that's currently winning, the power that's based in fear and greed, is not the power that's going to ultimately win. We have to tap into a power that is fueled by love for oneself, love for each other, and love for justice.