Julia Jordan-Zachery, Ph.D.

jjordanz@providence.edu

Providence College

Address: 1 Cunningham Square

City: Providence, Rhode Island - 02918

Country: United States

About Me:

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery is professor of Public and Community Service and Director of the Black Studies Program at Providence College (RI). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on African American women and public policy. She is also the author of the award winning book “Black women, cultural images and social policy” (2009 Routledge) and “Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics” (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Jordan-Zachery was recently award the Accinno Teaching Award, Providence College (2015-2016). Jordan-Zachery strives to bring intersectionality to a wider audience via her blog—Sapphire Unbound. Sapphire Unbound explores the lived realities of Black women and seeks to challenge the invisibility of Black women in policy and politics. She is the founder of the Black women and girls symposium (bwgsymposium.org) 

Research Interests

Gender and Politics

Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Public Policy

Black Women's Politics

Countries of Interest

United States

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2017) Beyond the Side Eye: Black Women’s Ancestral Anger as a Liberatory Practice, Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships

This article investigates how hauntology provides an entry into the ways relationships, forged out of trauma and anger, give way to Black women’s political actions. Anger, resulting from race-gender trauma, gives voice to the dead allowing them to speak in the here and now. Said anger can provide a vehicle to work through collective trauma and in my case, speak to Black women’s experiences with democracy. In this article I bring together hauntology, anger, and Black feminist praxis as a way of showing how hauntological relationships allow for an expression of intergenerational narratives of trauma and a critique of the state and state-centered violence, and offer a way for healing and achieving justice.

Books Written:

(2017) Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, And Politics, Rutgers University Press

What does it mean for Black women to organize in a political context that has generally ignored them or been unresponsive although Black women have shown themselves an important voting bloc? How for example, does #sayhername translate into a political agenda that manifests itself in specific policies? Shadow Bodies focuses on the positionality of the Black woman’s body, which serves as a springboard for helping us think through political and cultural representations. It does so by asking: How do discursive practices, both speech and silences, support and maintain hegemonic understandings of Black womanhood thereby rendering some Black women as shadow bodies, unseen and unremarked upon? Grounded in Black feminist thought, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery looks at the functioning of scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies in the framing of HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and mental illness and how such functioning renders some bodies invisible in Black politics in general and Black women’s politics specifically.

(2009) Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy, Routledge

Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy offers a critical analysis of the policy-making process. Jordan-Zachery demonstrates how social meanings surrounding the discourses on crime, welfare and family policies produce and reproduce discursive practices that maintain gender and racial hierarchies. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), she analyzes the values and ideologies ensconced in the various images of black womanhood and their impact on policy formation. This book provides exceptional insight into the racing-gendering process of policy making to show how relations of power and forms of inequality are discursively constructed and impact the lives of African American women.