Jamiella Brooks is a Black mother-scholar of two, the first person in her immediate family to learn a new language and pursue a doctoral degree, and occupies the multiplicitous spaces of wife, daughter, and descendant. She earned her Ph.D. in French Literature from University of California, Davis in 2018, a B.A. in English from Oberlin College, and served as Fulbright Teaching Assistant in France.

She has been published and featured in numerous academic spaces, including “Dissertating while Parenting—Not a Contradiction” (IdeasOnFire) and “Academia Is Violence-Generatives from a First Generation, Low-Income PhD Mother of Color,” in the second edition of Presumed Incompetent: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia, where she details the challenges of being a woman of color, economically marginalized, and a woman of color in spaces built predominately for white, affluent men. Her current project, Anticolonial Pedagogy, involves analyzing pedagogical practices of settler colonial education that persist in present-day teaching practices.

When she is not thinking academics, she is a sci fi and speculative fiction writer, and has a short story in Uncanny inspired by Critical Race Theory thinker Derrick Bell’s Space Trades.

Why I’m in MYFest: I love thinking in community with people from around the world, de-centering our practice and theory from a Western-centric context, and collaborate with fellow creatives!

MYFest involvement: I will be facilitating a workshop and attending as many sessions as I can!