
Day 7

Dr. Juanita Johnson-Bailey
What a "mentor collective" is and how to gather your's.
Juanita Johnson-Bailey holds the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professorship at the University of Georgia and is the 2015 recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Fund Award from the American Association of University Women. A professor of Education at the University of Georgia, she has worked at UGA for twenty years and currently holds an administrative appointment as the Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at UGA. She is the author of Sistahs in College: Making a Way Out of No Way, which received the Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature in Continuing Higher Education and the Sadie T. Mossell Alexander Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Black Women’s Studies.
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I'm an Associate Professor of Literacy and Language, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. I focus on dismantling supremacist patriarchies through research, teaching, and coaching. As a sociocultural literacist, I work to understand personal and public voices and stories to solve personal and public problems. I do this by researching the evolutionary nature and function of literacies and texts through the discourses of narrative research. My work exposes impetuses for various personal and social ills such as racism, sexism, and ableism.
I love to mediate way before dawn, work out like a soldier, and shop alone. I prefer rum to wine, jeans to skirts, and like my heels sky high (except when I'm wearing cowboy boots). Every year I ask my stylist to cornrow and bead my hair in homage to Patrice Rushen and Stevie Wonder (if you know of these artists and understand why demonstrating embodied respect for them is important, we can probably be friends). I believe in ghosts, fairies, and hobbits (for real). Musically, I vibe to old school everything (hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock, and classical) and especially dig Hildegard von Bingen. I trust children a little bit more than adults, respect teens for their fearlessness, admire elders for their tenacity, and occasionally prefer the company of dogs to people. I'm really getting into interior design and have a penchant for acquiring east coast real estate. I'm also a survivor of multiple terrors in love.
I invite you to learn more about me and the projects I am involved with at JeanineStaples.com.