Inspired by a feminist ethics of care and theories of justice, my duty as an instructor, colleague, and community member starts with service, support, trust, and respect.

As someone from Flint, Michigan, born to a family who survived only on Social Security Disability, my life was witness to intersectional diversity and the devastating policy effects that disproportionately affected my communities. Thanks to the support of my mentors, I was able to learn the history of ideas and the power of argumentation, and I believe it to be my responsibility to inspire future generations to do the same.

Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on Campus and in the Community

My undergraduate work at the University of Michigan-Flint focused on foreign languages, international studies, and anthropology, which broadened my experiences and deepened my commitment to social justice. I pursued an MA in English, and race was central to my studies, on projects from white solipsism in transcendental thought to exploring unacknowledged racism in literary studies. This work led to my semantics-based cognitive research on the free slave paradox, which I published in Semiotica.

As a teacher, I am committed to fostering anti-racist and anti-sexist spaces for all scholars, whether first-generation, low-income, underrepresented, international, traditional, or transfer students. My classes typically examine the work of race, gender, class, and sexuality in narratives. Rather than discuss their presence, we interrogate the functions of social structures that leverage identities for their operations. By showing my students the arena of cultural production, rather than merely explore their surface participation, they gain the opportunity to see the work of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia in their lives from a transdisciplinary third space.

For example, starting in 2013, I began taking my students to locations of hate crime and bias incidents on campus to sponsor a forum to discuss these pressing, intricate, and complex issues. Since experiences can reinforce the memory of a discussion, I facilitate conversations along the walk that not only serve to strengthen the importance of diversity and respect but also examine the privilege underlying the hate reported by asking students to read from the lists in Peggy McIntosh's “White Privilege and Male Privilege” at each site. This award-winning event encourages students to understand racism spatially, write reflections on the experience, develop profiles of the types of hate crimes, and learn about white and male privilege, particularly by noting where we do not go. By the end of the event, students can speak to the recent history of hate crimes on campus in their classes and among their peers, consider matters of privilege as a vehicle of cultural critique, and use writing to explore if not examining complicated topics thoughtfully.

In 2019, on behalf of a partner agency of the Center for Cognition and Neuroethics, I solely wrote a grant to help Flint children affected by the Flint Water Crisis, which the Environmental Protection Agency awarded $30,000. The nutrition program created thereby aims to identify how socioeconomic conditions and cultural barriers interplay with food selection among Flint residents and understand how nutrition and lead exposure can be overcome through educational interventions.

Rooted in philosophy, I have ontological commitments to ethics and justice that inform my duties to students and how I establish fairness in the classroom through the following principles and examples:

As you see, my engagement with diversity is at once the heart of my identity and my life's work. Whether examining the effects of racist cognitive frames in scholarship, helping underrepresented students get into graduate school, or helping my privileged students open their eyes to the experiences of others, I am fully committed to promoting justice and fairness across my research, teaching, and service.