Jelisa Clark

Race, Gender, Black Feminisms, Education, Qualitative Methods, Applied Sociology

Dr. Jelisa S. Clark joined the sociology department at Georgia State University in 2024. She
earned a BBA in Marketing from the University of Kentucky, and MA and PhD in Applied
Sociology from the University of Louisville. Her research and teaching are focused on the intersection of race and gender in education with emphasis on the experiences of Black youth. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and Race, Ethnicity, and Education. She is associate editor for the Journal of African American Males in Education and a research affiliate with the Black Men’s Research Institute at Morehouse College.

Research Interests
Dr. Clark is a co-author of Empowering Men of Color on Campus: Building Student Community in Higher Education, which examines how Men of Color negotiate college through their participation in a male success program.
Her current project focuses on the discourses informing our understanding of Black youth and communities. She argues that controlling images associated with “ghetto” and “urban” are raced and gendered. Specifically, projections of “Baby Mamas,” “Missing Black Men,” “Bad Boys,” and “Fast Tail Girls” function to erase Black childhoods.
She is also working on the “Possibilities Project,” which builds on her previous work with boys and men to conceptualize “possibilities” as a challenge to the ways that Black youth are constructed in educational spaces. This work analyzes how seven dimensions of possibilities (dreaming, caring, belonging, enjoying, agency, protecting, and affirming) contribute to Black boys’ thriving in education.