Dr. Dawn Demps
“There is knowledge inherent in different cultures. The culture that you came up with has value.”
“The Black community has always believed that you use your education to help the wider community.”
1. What drives the work that you do?
I am driven by my own experiences as a student and as a mother interacting with the educational system under the shadow of the histories of de jure and de facto exclusionary actions that disproportionately have a negative impact on Black folks. My scholarship looks at the various ways Black students, Black parents and Black educators are effectively pushed out of educational spaces through a myriad of tactics. Simultaneously, I seek to highlight the creative resistance and agentive joy Black people tap into for sustenance, rejuvenation and possibility despite the spectrum of erected barriers to their progress. I love art and believe we as Black people have used it to tell our stories, revolt against injustice, exhibit our beauty, and envision better futures. So, I do incorporate art as a powerful data point that can reveal what may be left unspoken.
2. What fuels your passion?
I am inspired by all of the children and families I have had the honor of working with during my years in youth programming, community organizing and nonprofit organizations. That work then as my academic work now is fueled by an ethic of communal care and radical love undergirded by a belief in the intersecting fates we all share across spaces. Ultimately, we all fail or fly together and from my experiential knowledge and scholarly study, I have come to understand that access to high-quality, adequately resourced, edifying educational opportunities for all our children across zip codes and marginalized designations, is a powerful key to ensuring we all rise.
3. What advice would you give your younger self?
There is so much I would go back and tell young Dawn. I would tell her to not let anyone convince her that she is not worth the ticket price to access her company, talents, and knowledge. I would tell her that she does not need to shrink her tall self to make others comfortable. I would tell her that self-reflection is a superpower and that she is more than enough.
“We serve as mirrors. We want to be mirrors to young people so that they can look at us and see themselves and say, ‘I can go all the way.”
Engage with this video podcast, where Dr. Demps shares her school journey, her research, educational policy, autoethnography, and the power of storytelling.
“I would like to see a future where children are free to learn in the ways that are best for them.”
Explore Dr. Demp’s Featured Publications
- Blooming In the Shafts: A Black Mother Scholar’s Tale of Flipping Pandemic Precarity to Educational Possibility.
- Schools, Black Mothers, Black Children, and the Tenets of Disillusionment.
- “It’s Everybody’s Job”: Youth and Adult Constructions of Responsibility to Take Action for School Change through PAR.
DON’T MISS THIS ENGAGING “WILLING TO LEARN” PODCAST, in which Dr. Demps shares her personal journey, revealing how her son's experiences not only spurred her academic investigations but also led her to embrace 'Homeschooling as Marronage' as a form of resistance and liberation. This act of educational marronage forms a critical backdrop to her quest to 'interrupt the school to prison pipeline,' which culminated in her first solo publication in the Journal of Negro Education.