My research agenda centers collaborative knowledge production, as both theory and method, with a clear and unwavering commitment to social justice. All of my research projects are conceptualized, developed, undertaken, analyzed, and disseminated in partnership with Black feminist organizers who serve as full and equal co-investigators. Together, we examine the complex processes through which everyday people analyze and refuse the violences of gendered racial capitalism –– and also explore how we can build worlds that are more survivable than our present through struggles reproductive justice, abolition feminism, climate justice, and mutual aid. To do so, we employ a diverse array of methodologies, including critical ethnography, storytelling, and digital archives. Our work is, thus, deeply interdisciplinary, bridging the fields of anthropology, Black studies, American studies, gender studies, and religious studies. It is also deeply collaborative. I am the Co-Founder of Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans, a Black feminist applied institute for participatory research in the American South.
Below you will find a list of my current and past projects. My research has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life, the Dartmouth College Venture Fund, Florida State University’s Council on Research and Creativity, and the Robert B. Bradley Library Research Grants, among others.
current research projects
fire dreams: making black feminist liberation in the south
Duke University Press, 2024; Collectively-authored with Women With A Vision; Foreword by Deon Haywood.
Twelve years ago, on May 24, 2012, Women With A Vision’s (WWAV) New Orleans offices were firebombed by still-unknown arsonists. The arson attack was a form of spiritual warfare. It was intended to break us and force us to close our doors. And yet, we’re still here. For thirty-five years, WWAV has been fighting for the liberation of our communities by fighting for reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers’ rights. After the arson attack, we started collecting every life-giving ember from our history of organizing work that we could find: first, the handfuls of photographs, posters, and documents that had not gone up in flames, and then, our presence with one another and with our communities, which we began to record through life history interviews, collective storytelling sessions, and more. Together, we cared for these embers, tended to them, stitched them together into what became the Born in Flames Living Archive, set them free in our book, Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South, and are now working to share them with our community through the EMBERS southern black feminist zine project.
We have published portions of our research in Southern Cultures (2021), the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2020), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2018), and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (2017).
the callie house project
Launched through a $250,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, “The Callie House Project: Religion and Public Health in the Black Experience in the American South” aims to develop a living archive of documents and oral histories that capture the experience of race, religion, and public health in the American South. Through this project, my longtime friend and co-thinker, Deon Haywood, the Executive Director of WWAV, and I are partnering with Black feminist reproductive justice practitioners to document the untold health and racial justice organizing histories in our region, to alter public discourse, and to build greater health equity across the South.
creating the world anew
How can we amplify work that can actualize a world otherwise? Where do we see glimmers of this world taking shape?
Launched through a second $250,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, “Creating the World Anew: Religion and Mutual Aid” explores the connection between religious traditions and community-based mutual aid to challenge racial capitalism and build alternative economic and social systems. WWAV and I are leading an affinity group for this project entitled “EMBERS: words to help us build together the world that must be.”
abolition is sacred work
Expected manuscript completion June 2027.
For nearly three decades, I have partnered with grassroots organizers in the movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons who are working to end violence and transform our communities without relying on the criminal punishment system. These organizers call us to respond to the life and death needs of criminalized communities, and to do so with an unwavering commitment to radically restructuring society. Abolition is Sacred Work offers from the depths of their radical thinking and world-building care to foment struggle in these times. But why is their work “sacred“? I argue that organizers are tapping into something beyond our current reality, into an imagined world that has yet to be. Weaving in and out of movement accounts from Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, and Tallahassee, Abolition is Sacred Work traces the new theories of time, space, and social relations that criminalized communities make to imagine and build abolitionist futures in real time.
I published the essay “Abolition is Sacred Work” with The Immanent Frame in 2021 to honor the labor of southern movement organizers dismantling our prison nation. It was among the top ten most read articles that year.
moral medicine
Over the past three decades, women’s incarceration has exploded across the South, increasing more than eightfold and at twice the rate of men’s. This project offers a history of the present that challenges both the stories we tell about gendered criminalization and the tools we use to tell them. Through a rigorous, community-driven research design, I will partner with formerly incarcerated women as co-researchers to trace the persistence of centuries-old carceral logics about women’s immorality as a disease to be treated –– what we call “moral medicine.” Grounded in our collective refusal of these logics, we will write new intimate histories of southern incarcerated women’s worlds to expose the contingencies of these institutions as they are, opening new possibilities for what might become.
This project takes inspiration from currently incarcerated scholars at the Indiana Women’s Prison, who were the first to discover that prostitution was missing from the list of crimes for which women were sentenced when their facility opened in 1873. Their research led to the identification of a system of confinement run by Catholic nuns that long predated the creation of a separate women’s carceral sphere, thereby challenging decades of historiographical consensus. “Moral Medicine” will build on their work by crafting robust histories that center the epistemologies of those held captive.
digital archives and new media
making abolition archive
Launched in memory of formerly incarcerated AIDS activist, John Horace Bell, the “Making Abolition” archive is a collaborative project at the intersections of freedom, confinement, and abolition. We are focusing on zines, posters, art books, campaign materials, workbooks, and other media produced by BIPOC women, queer people, transgender people, and gender nonconforming people in prison. This archive will guide a series of political education workshops with students and local activists for reflecting together on what abolitionists actually do and imagining new horizons of struggle in our communities. Our first donation was a collection of zines and toolkits from Mariame Kaba.
a wall is just a wall
My ongoing collaborative research with the communities building abolitionist futures in real time buttresses the work of the making abolition archive. “A Wall Is Just A Wall” is a study of religious practice, forced migration, and social transformation, which moves with Chicago’s Rev. Doris Green throughout her more than three decades of work to hold together the relationships that mass incarceration would sever. Against academic portraits that rehearse the quotidian terror that our nation’s ballooning prison empire has wrought, this project asks: Why has mass criminalization not been able to destroy the communities it has been wielded against? Rev. Green’s spiritual labor to organize multigenerational Black liberation study groups with the incarcerated and their loved ones provides a migratory map of community connection, meticulously and deliberately stitched against the violence around them. Assembling these stories into a monograph and multimodal archive is work I undertake for scholars, students, and activists alike.
Portions of this research have been published in a CrossCurrents special issue on “Religion, Political Democracy, and the Specters of Race” (2019), edited by James Logan.
refusing to vanish
This project explores gender, faith, and justice in a time of AIDS through the witnesses of two HIV-positive Muslim women: Faghmeda Miller from Cape Town, South Africa and Waheedah Shabazz-El from Philadelphia, USA. Both women were diagnosed at dire moments in the AIDS epidemics in their countries, and both have gone on to transform their personal struggles for treatment, care, and support into public lives of meaning for thousands. As such, Waheedah’s and Faghmeda’s lives and work not only shed light on the complexities of resistance in the midst of extremis; their stories also illuminate the complex interplay between HIV vulnerability and forced removal, between Muslim women’s leadership and traditional religious authority, between public figures and private selves.
A preview, “Refusing to Vanish: Muslim Women’s AIDS Activism,” was published by The Revealer for World AIDS Day 2017. Foundational research for this monograph was included in Islam and AIDS: Beyond Scorn, Pity and Justice (Oneworld Press, 2009).
past projects
religio-racial identity as challenge and critique
The “Religio-Racial Identity as Challenge and Critique” roundtable I edited for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2020 grew from the sustained collective reading of Judith Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration as a theory and method text on race and religion for the field writ large.
an otherwise anthopology
Through the “Otherwise Anthropology” learning laboratory I built with my dear friend and colleague Megan Raschig, we united scholars and activists of social movements in North America, East Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Europe in sustained conversation. Together, we published a compendium of our ethical tools and methodological challenges as a Cultural Anthropology ‘Theorizing the Contemporary’ series.
method-making in concert
With my dear friend and colleague Yana Stainova, I co-dreamed a project on “Method-Making in Concert,” through which we undertook fieldwork in tandem and steady conversation to reimagine the possibilities for ethnographic practice when every facet of our work is opened to the intimacies of collaboration. We brought this methodological approach to bear in a graduate seminar we co-taught between McMaster University and Florida State University called, “Collaborative Ethnographies,” and are preparing an article for publication.
the war on drugs is a war on relationships
This project unfolded in partnership with a community of HIV-positive formerly imprisoned activists, as they worked to repair the tenuous threads of their Philadelphia communities neighborhood by neighborhood in the early 2000s. Through a methodology of moving with, we examined the community-level systemic dislocation caused by mass incarceration, its historic and contemporary intersections with the domestic AIDS epidemic, and the citizen movements to address these twin epidemics. A peer-reviewed article-length piece was published as part of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Cages (University of Georgia Press, 2012).
laura mctighe 