Jamila Lyiscott

Jamila Lyiscott aka, Dr. J, is an award-winning community-engaged scholar, nationally renowned speaker, and the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom. She currently serves as an Associate Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the founding co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, and previously led the journal of Equity & Excellence in Education as an Editor-in-Chief. Dr. J’s research and activism work together to explore, assert, and defend the value of Black life globally. Her research examines the liberatory capacity of language and culture in the lives of youth of color, racial healing, youth-led activism, and the power of the African Diaspora to transgress coloniality.

Dr. J is most well known for being featured on TED.com where her video, ‘3 Ways to Speak English,’ has been viewed over 5 million times. She has been an invited keynote speaker at 100s of institutions and has been featured on BBC Radio, NPR, in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up,”Cosmopolitan, NowThis, and many other media outlets nationally and internationally.

As a testament to her commitment to bridging public and academic scholarship, Dr. J’s work has also been published in a range of leading academic journals including, Review of Research in Education, Action Research, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, English Journal, and more. She holds multiple faculty fellowships and is the recipient of the AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award, the AERA Scholar-Activist & Community Advocacy Award, a Fulbright-Hays Award, and the CIES Emerging Scholar Award.