Unlocking Our Voices: Live Podcast Recording

About the podcast:

Unlocking Our Voices is a podcast that focuses specifically on the Black diasporas, the issues, the stories, the controversies, the cultures, and the ongoing oppression and injustices faced by our people around the world. Unlocking Our Voices aims to connect people of the Black diasporas in new and exciting ways, giving them the chance to seek empowerment by tracing their history and understanding how the past influences the present they live in, and how they hold the keys to shaping everyone’s future. We seek to enhance and evolve ourselves socially, politically, economically, and physically by having face-to-face, constructive conversations with a diverse, far-reaching list of guests from around the world.

About the host:

Mr. Greg Fuller, has a bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and a Master’s degree in History from Rutgers University. He is a Historian and the Founder of Unlocking Our Voices Podcast.

The podcast focuses specifically on the Black diasporas, the issues, the stories, the controversies, the cultures, and the ongoing oppression and injustices faced by our people around the world. The show seeks to enhance and evolve the Black diaspora people socially, politically, economically, and physically by having face-to-face, constructive conversations with a diverse, far-reaching list of guests from around the world.

About the guest:

Dr. Nicole Dezrea Jenkins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She received her Doctoral degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the Department of Sociology in 2020. She obtained an M.A. in Sociology in 2017 and B.A. in Sociology in 2015 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In 2013, she received an A.A. in Criminal Justice after serving six years of active duty in the United States Air Force as Military Police. She is a proud advocate for social justice and committed to teaching with such emphasis on topics such as Sociology of Poverty and Problems of the Black Community. As a qualitative researcher and urban ethnographer, she incorporates intersectional and critical feminist frameworks into her own research, centering the experiences of women in the African Diaspora. ​ Her recent research project incorporates two years of ethnographic data collection in a Las Vegas African hair braiding salon. She finds that Black women's identity-making process is complex and perceptions of nationhood and Black womeness often impede the process. She is the recipient of the Princeton University Press Supportive Diverse Voices Book Proposal Development Grant and is currently working on her first book project from this research project, tentatively entitled CROWNed: Black Women’s Entanglement with U.S. institutions.

Her Global Crowns research project on natural hair is intended to extend the conversation of natural hair discrimination globally by capturing the experiences of Black women around the globe who wear their natural hair.

She also serves as a Faculty Advisor for the Mothers of the Mecca Research Initiative in the Center for Women, Gender, and Global Leadership Mothers of the Mecca Research Initiative in the Center for Women, Gender, and Global Leadership at Howard University and has begun research that captures the experiences of students, faculty, and staff who are also parents.