The Racism-Race Reification Process

Dr. Alyasah Ali Sewell (they/them/their) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University and Affiliated Faculty with the Departments of African American Studies and Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences. Building on a crowd-sourced library project in the wake of the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016, they founded The Race and Policing Project in 2016— a third-party curating of research on the criminal legal system, injury prevention, and policing inequities. In 2022, they launched the Critical Racism Data Lab — a media lab to cultivate and create multi-method research on social problems that center systemic, structural, and institutional racism and address data equity issues in methodological approaches on racism, race, and ethnicity for academic, public, and hybrid learners. They are a widely-published medical sociologist, social psychologist, and research methodologist of policy-relevant research on racism, health, and policing inequities across the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Their research has garnered awards and support from the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. They are the 2021 Georgia Sociologist of the Year. Planned Parenthood designated them “The Future: Innovator and Visionary Who Will Transform Black Communities”. They are Principal Investigator of the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey in partnership with Justice Work, a think tank/action lab, with whom they build, conduct, and archive intersectional community-centered research designs. They received postdoctoral training in Demography from the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Their Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Indiana University with a Ph.D. minor in social science research methods, and their B.A. summa cum laude in Sociology from the University of Florida with a minor in Women’s Studies. They use creative literary traditions to narrate stories of the institutions and intersections of race, gender, and sexuality based on evidence-based research.