EP009: Dr. Ashley Coleman Taylor Talks about Atlanta as Black Queer Place

Dr. Ashley Coleman Taylor talks about her work collecting black queer oral histories that will preserve an important part of Atlanta's past. We also talk about the impact of storytelling on creating/sustaining social justice movements and how Audre Lorde's concept of the "erotic" is an asset to harnessing one's personal power.

Ashley Coleman Taylor, Ph.D. is an Instructor of Women’s Studies at Agnes Scott College and formerly a Lecturer in the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. As an interdisciplinary ethnographer, she specializes in the intersecting lived experiences of black embodiment, black genders and sexualities, and African diaspora religious experience.

She was a 2016-2017 Visiting Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. Her book project, Majestad (MA-hey-stod) Negra: Race, Class, Gender and Religious Experience in the Puerto Rican Imaginary is an intersectional black feminist approach to race, class, gender, and activism in Puerto Rico. The manuscript is a finalist for the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize.

Her current project, Atlanta as Black Queer Place, is an archival oral history project that centers the lived experiences of Atlanta-based LGBT activists and features qualitative geospatial methodologies.

She can be contacted via email at AshleyColemanTaylor@gmail.com