Dr. Sadiyah Malcolm-Wallace

Assistant Professor, Sociology | University of Massachusetts - Amherst

I am a passionate scholar-educator dedicated to exploring the rich and complex lifeworlds of Black girls. My research delves into the particularities of power, intersectionality, sexualities, violence, empire, and the afterlives of colonialism. A community-worker turned ethnographer, I combine multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in Black, Caribbean, and Transnational Feminist traditions in my sociological explorations of identity, culture, and social life. One of the core methods I use is critical ethnography, which allows me to center a critique of power in both my study and analyses. My current project focuses on Black girls attending high school in Kingston, Jamaica, as they navigate the transition to adulthood against the backdrop of Jamaica’s colonial history and contemporary social violence. I particularly attend to how the legacies of colonialism and enslavement, hyper-sexualization, reproductive coercion, social control, and moral imperialism shape and mirror their social lives as well as the nation’s broader social landscape. 

In my assessments of how race (and color), gender, class, and sexualities intersect in urban environments in the Global South, my research offers a fresh sociological perspectives on social identities, geo-politics, Black Girlhoods, and power. I see critical ethnography as a profound instrument for uncovering broader social patterns evident in the quotidian experiences of marginalized individuals, groups, and communities. My scholarship makes substantial contributions to sociology, gender and sexualities studies, girlhood studies, Black studies, and research on the Global South by closely analyzing how power shapes everyday social dynamics, child and social welfare, agency, education, and social identity.