Gabrielle is a Columbia, Maryland native who in May of this year will get two Bachelor’s degrees in sociology and political science with a minor in law & society from the University of Maryland, College Park. Within her studies, she primarily focuses on critical race theory social science research to learn more about race relations within the United States.
Her most recent research is an IRB-approved interview study entitled “Perceptions of Blackness” where she interviewed undergraduate Black students at both the University of Maryland and Howard University to compare and contrast feelings of racial identity at both types of institutions during the Black Lives Matter movement. An academic article analyzing this data will be published later this year. You can access a conference presentation poster here.
Utilizing her background in sociology and race relations, over the summer Gabrielle created a free online course about the history of racial inequality. This course focused on different areas of social stratification such as with health, wealth, socioeconomic status, mass incarceration, housing, etc. You can access those lessons here. She is currently working on a capstone research project to propose monetary reparations for African American descendants of slavery. This will take the form of spreading awareness on social media and contacting local elected officials to urge them to support a reparations program. You can find her literature review here.
After she graduates undergrad, Gabrielle will be getting her Master’s of Public Administration with a focus in social policy from the University of Pennsylvania. She hopes to utilize her background in researching social stratification to propose social policies that can help marginalized communities.
Inspired by the poetry reading by Dr. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram of their poem "A Queen City Fractal", Gabrielle created a GIF to illustrate a piece of the poem that was of great interest to her. Fascinated by Dr. Bertram's usage of mathematics in their poetry, Gabrielle wanted to show what imagery was in her mind while listening to Dr. Bertram speak.
Throughout her life, Gabrielle utilized works from Black female authors to better understand her identity as a Black woman and felt a sense of community over shared experiences. As someone greatly interested in Black literature, Gabrielle put together a video showing what she believes to be 20 of the most influential and important readings to understand Black womanhood, femininity, intersectionality, and racial inequality. A great number of these readings have been prominent in her critical race theory research. It is very interesting to see in what ways these ideas and concepts have changed or stayed the same over time throughout the past 100 years as we have seen developments in our society. Take this video as a book recommendation to either help further explore your own identity or to better understand someone else's. This could be uploaded to Instagram as a Reel.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/a2b66b37-7ae9-4c66-9965-83544a8db1c8/20_Books-3.mov
Over the summer, Gabrielle created a free online course about the history of racial inequality towards African Americans that covered issues such as wealth, health, jobs, housing, etc. These recorded Zoom lectures were typically around an hour long. To make these lessons more accessible, Gabrielle has transformed her one lesson about health inequality into a more digestible Twitter thread which you can access here.