Imagining New Relationships: Black Queers and Family

Abstract

Thelathia “Nikki” Young is Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Bucknell University. She recently received her doctoral degree in Christian Ethics from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. Her research focuses on ethical issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and particularly emphasizes the ways that black queer communities possess, embody, and enact moral excellence. She is currently at work on her dissertation-to-book manuscript, “Imagining New Relationships: Black Queers and Family,” which investigates the moral norms of kinship and family that foreground the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. Nikki is also Director of Ambassadors for the All My Children Project, a program in which she mentors and teaches college students to reflect critically and organize campus activities designed to raise awareness about the consequences of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQQ) bias within ethnically diverse families and communities.