SoCo from left to right: Ayshea Banes, Micah Sagers, Curtis O’Dwyer, Izabela de Souza, Griffin Granberry, Jessica Lee Stovall, Angela Fitzgerald, Jada Young, Kaleb Autman, Ziyen Curtis, Lisa Oyolu
W.E.B. Du Bois famously asked the question of the Black community: “How does it feel to be a problem?”Drawing inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, the SoulFolk Collective (affectionately called “SoCo”) is a community of researchers dedicated to positioning Black space as a blueprint for more liberatory futures. In our solution-based research, we center Black experiences, histories, and futures in scholarly inquiry. We aim to touch the very essence of the Black soul—acknowledging its pain, celebrating its joy, and committing to its freedom through every page of our scholarship.
Our research collective engages in multidisciplinary research that prioritizes Black-affirming methodologies that amplify the voices, stories, and lived realities of Black communities. The research collective is committed to rigorous, disciplined study, ensuring high standards of intellectual and personal integrity while communicating our findings accessibly. This dual mission ensures that the knowledge we generate is meaningful and impactful, especially for the communities we serve. Central to our research practice is thick description (Ryle, 1971)—providing rich, nuanced accounts that give color and depth to the lives, struggles, and joys of those with whom we co-create knowledge. We hope to destablize estabished racial categories, and reimagine new ways of being and connecting.
The SoulFolk Collective fosters a nurturing environment for creative and critical scholarship that challenges traditional narratives and reimagines otherwise possibilities. Rooted in the Black soul, our research collective is a space where the richness of Black thought and experience is not just observed, but deeply felt, and woven into the fabric of our collective striving toward liberation for all.
“PWIs have historically been sites of exclusion for Black professors and students, and I hope to be a part of reimagining learning spaces through this Black-affirming research lab. I wanted to be a part of co-creating a scholarly space with students and community that was responsive and impactful to the needs and livelihoods of the Black people.
I believe that impactful and soulful research is better when done with an intellectual community, where we push each other not just in our intellect but in our ethics to ensure that the work we do is actually making progress in the long road toward emancipation (Walcott, 2021). By creating an academic lab focused on Black-affirming research, we can center on concepts often overlooked or misunderstood in traditional research, such as joy, community healing, intergenerational wisdom, resistance practices, and liberatory education.”
— Dr. Jessica Lee Stovall, Assistant Professor & Director of The SoulFolk Collective
Our current project:
The state of Wisconsin ranks among the worst in the U.S. for racial disparities impacting its Black residents, such as rates of unemployment, educational inequities, segregation, and mass incarceration. Amidst historical challenges in funding efforts to counteract these inequities, local Madison community leader Reverend Dr. Alexander Gee has raised over $30 million to build a state-of-the-art The Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison (“The Center”). Opening late fall 2025, The Center hopes to be a national model of an institutional resource for Black residents in medium-sized, predominantly white cities.
The SoulFolk’s collaboration with The Center will be an invaluable foundation for what has the potential to help us understand the structural barriers that Black residents face and how an extensive, community-based center might be a model for helping Black people address and overcome the antiblackness they encounter. In this ethnographically inspired research, we will investigate the following questions: What are the current experiences of Black Madison residents? Where do they report that Black culture and excellence currently exist in Madison? What are their hopes and concerns about The Center? As this study sets up for a “before and after” look, this initial exploratory study will be an essential avenue for capturing how The Center is a catalyst in transforming the experiences and life outcomes of Black people who live in Madison, as well as what we can learn from the current freedom dreams (Kelley, 2022) of Black people who live here.
In addition to collaborating with The Center, we are creating a dynamic of archive oral histories of Black people who live in Madison, where the public can click on a map of Madison and hear the stories of the spaces and places that have been Black-affirming, creating a map of human geographies of resistance and liberation.
Curtis O’Dwyer is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests encompass Science Teaching, Science and Technology Studies, History of Education, Race, Black Studies, and Political Economy. His work investigates how historical Black teaching philosophies and liberatory practices shape our understanding of the limits and possibilities in science teaching and learning, both past and present. Curtis is an Education Graduate Research Scholar (EdGRS) Fellow and a Pella Science Education Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His scholarship appears in the St. Louis American and is forthcoming in book chapter publications. He earned his B.S. in Biology with a minor in Mathematics from Roosevelt University and his Master of Arts in Teaching from Washington University in St. Louis. Before starting his doctoral studies, Curtis worked as a middle school science teacher for six years.
Kaleb Bakari Autman [02-02-2002] is a multi-disciplined documentarian, writer, scholar, cook, and organizer from the Westside of Chicago. His work has been published by the New York Times, Upfront Magazine, Injustice Watch, and Truthout. A blood memory and survivance worker, Kaleb situates his work on the worlds not yet born. He currently studies Sociology and Legal Studies as a First Wave Scholar at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His research explores the relationship of Black and Indigenous Communities, Social Movements, Governance, and Institution Building. He’s an Eddie Adams Workshop Dietz Awardee and a HEX-U Fellow with the Center for the Humanities.
Angela Fitzgerald Ward (she/her) is a doctoral student in the School of Human Ecology’s Civil Society and Community Studies department at UW- Madison. She has a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Psychology, and is broadly interested in the intersections between research, community engagement and organizing. Angela’s research interests also align with her professional roles at Madison College and PBS Wisconsin, where she works to create spaces for historically marginalized groups to be supported and have their stories told. As a former east-coaster who now calls Madison home, she looks forward to contributing to the important work of the SoulFolk Collective in amplifying and supporting the needs of the Madison Black community.
Griffin Granberry (they/them) is a first-year Graduate Fellow in UW’s African American Studies Department. They attended the University of Wisconsin for their undergraduate studies as well, graduating in 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies and German Language. As a Master’s Student, their research starts by situating the archive as a site of violence, exploring from there how marginalized communities have created alternative archives to preserve their own histories. In their free time, Griffin enjoys reading whatever they can get their hands on – prioritizing stories with dragons, of course – and visiting their many feathered friends at the nearby International Crane Foundation. Find Griffin snuggled up with their three cats or studying with a chilly coffee in the Graduate Student Office!
Jada Young (she/her) is an incoming M.A. student in African American Studies and Ph.D. student in Educational Policy Studies. She holds a M.A. in Educational Studies with a concentration in Educational Equity, Justice, and Social Transformation from the University of Michigan; where she was awarded the Rackham Merit Fellowship. Additionally, Jada is a proud PEOPLE Scholar alumna of UW-Madison, and has a B.S. in Education Studies with a certificate in African American Studies. Her research interests are interdisciplinary across education, African American studies, gender and women’s studies, and carceral studies. Jada’s research explores the criminalization of Black girls in behavior-alternative schools. Outside of academia, Jada enjoys traveling, trying new food, and spending time with her family and puppy!
Ziyen Curtis (she/they) is a doctoral student of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Global and International Studies, with a specification in Culture and Identity, and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Pennsylvania State University. Ziyen’s research interests include History Education and Black history curricula. Through their research, she aims to analyze the consequences of racially exclusive history curricula in the U.S. and the ethics of value in the context of Black history curricula.
Lisa Oyolu (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Educational Policy Studies department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on civic education and how African immigrant youth make sense of their health, communities, identities, and educational experiences. Lisa’s research interests have been informed by her experience volunteering with an African immigrant youth-serving educational nonprofit and working as a college admission counselor. She joined The SoulFolk Collective to conduct research using asset-based lenses which center Black joy, healing, resistance, and possibility. Outside of school, she loves spending time with friends and family or listening to a podcast.
Dr. Jessica Lee Stovall (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research in education draws on the discipline of Black Studies to explore how Black teachers create fugitive spaces to navigate and combat antiblackness at their respective school sites. Jessica had the pleasure of seeing some examples of research spaces that strove to be Black-affirming when she was in graduate school, and she knew as soon as she began at UW-Madison that she wanted to build an intellectual community where the focus is on the resilience, creativity, brilliance, and freedom dreams of Black people, instead of just the trauma and harm. Before beginning her doctoral studies at Stanford, Jessica taught English and reading for 11 years in the Chicagoland area, and she is trying to finish 52 novels by the end of the calendar year.
Ayshea Banes (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Physics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her bachelors in physics with minors in mathematics and chemistry from Wichita State University. She became interested in physics and astronomy when she saw Jupiter for the first time with her first telescope at 7 years old! Though, as time continued on, she became more interested in physics education and how we can transform it. Her research now focuses on ways to center Blackness within the physics classroom and how physics can aid in Black liberation. Outside of academics, she really enjoys doing puzzles, pilates, reading, and petting her cats!
Citations
Kelley, R. D. (2022). Freedom dreams: The black radical imagination. Beacon Press.
Ryle, G. (1971). Collected papers. Volume II collected essays, 1929-1968. London: Hutchinson, Our collective agreements
Walcott, R. (2021). The long emancipation: Moving toward Black freedom. Duke University Press.