Dr. Sadiyah Malcolm-Wallace

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 my study, and in my and analyses. 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 current book project focuses on Black girls attending high school in Urban 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, and my research offers a fresh sociological perspective on social identity, geo-politics, Black Girlhoods, and power, to closely analyze how power shapes everyday social dynamics, instututions, and socialization.