Jennifer Esposito
Biographic Data
| ID | 140518 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Esposito |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Esposito |
| SIGNATURE | ESPOSITO J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgia State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8074-6715 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Crisis leadership in Georgia: Navigating policy, people, and dual pandemics in K-12 education
This research investigated how K-12 school and district leaders in Georgia enacted leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews with 11 educational leaders (10 of whom identified as African American), this study explored how proximity to policy and people shaped leaders’ actions and understandings of crisis leadership. Findings reveal that while all participants experienced the pandemic as an acute and ongoing emergency, their l…
Educators in popular culture: Educational settings as sites of intersectional struggle
Twenty-first century popular culture is a rich educative space (Edwards & Esposito, 2019) characterized by the emergence of new genres, technologies, and popular culture phenomena that transcend tw...
The Black female principal in reel/real life: An intersectional examination of Ava Coleman on Abbott Elementary
Running Toward Freedom: Developing Fugitive Methodology Through Care and Collective Healing
This article reflects on a qualitative study of Black women principals who led schools through forced closures and the liberatory potential of what we term “Fugitive Methodology.” Instead of centering the original research study, we utilize it to reflect on the potential of Fugitive Methodology as a way of engaging in research with communities who have historically been harmed by traditional approaches. Through recorded conversations and collabor…
“It’s a Calling. You Answered.”
Abbott Elementary, a mockumentary comedy series airing on ABC, examines the plight of an underfunded, underresourced elementary school in Philadelphia. In this article, we argue that Abbott Elementary is a compelling look inside an, albeit fictional, urban school located in the city of Philadelphia. The mockumentary form of the series positions the viewer as ethnographer so that we, in essence, engage in data collection as we listen to documentar…
Multimodal Expressions of Self: Telling Ghost Stories as Intersectional African American and Latinx American Scholars
Using autoethnography to critically analyze personal and cultural experiences, we use the notion of “home” metaphorically through (a) academia—of our traumatic experiences as African American and Latinx women seeking acceptance in academic institutions despite blatant inequities, discrimination, and racism; and (b) intergenerational family and ancestral narratives—of past/present experiences and stories of identities, homes, and borders. We craft…
Would You Wear That to Church?!”: The Production of “Ladies” in an All Girls’ After-School Club in the Southeast United States
This study investigated how Black middle school girls negotiated an after-school club, with a specific focus on ways of knowing and acting as “ladies.” Drawing from Fordham’s intersectional analyses of the histories and politics behind her conceptualization of “those loud black girls,” we explore and critique the ways in which the girls were subjects of, and subjected to, context-specific discourses of race, class, and gender. Critical race theor…
It’s Not Enough to Just Insert a Few People of Color: ” An Intersectional Analysis of Failed Leadership in Netflix’s The Chair Series
Leadership roles in higher education are still held predominately by white male leaders while women of color, especially, struggle to be recognized, hired, and/or appointed as leaders. In popular culture, though there have been films and television series that focus on student life on campus, there have been few representations of life as a leader in higher education. A new six-episode Netflix series, The Chair, about the first woman of color dep…
Popular Culture as an Educative Site Regarding the January 6, 2021 Insurrection: Grappling With Complexity Through Intersectional Analyses a Special Issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
The insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 is distinct because of its deep ties to White supremacist rhetoric and mobilization. What is also significant is the undeniable role of popular media in establishing the discourse, leadership, and plans that made the event possible. This special issue uses intersectional analysis to interrogate why/how the uprising occurred, and to imagine education as a critical intervention t…
Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix
Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix explores how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social categories are represented in, and constructed by, some of the most significant popular culture artifacts in contemporary Western culture. Through readings of racialized television sitcoms, LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream American music, the role of Black Panther in Western imperialist projects, a…
Using Others in the Nicest Way Possible: On Colonial and Academic Practice(s), and an Ethic of Humility
In this article, we draw from two independent, completed projects that forced us to struggle with our ethics and how we understood the nature of the researcher-participant relationship. We move past the presumption that we social justice-minded qualitative researchers are "needed" to discuss how we understand ourselves to be meeting that need. Here, our intent is to trouble qualitative researchers' underlying assumptions about help and harm when …
Ethical Quandaries: Qualitative Research in a Neoliberal Age
We have witnessed our universities becoming neoliberal institutions as monetary goals surmount academic ones and knowledge becomes a commodity. As professors in a neoliberal institution, we mourn in this moment as we are forced to become skilled at negotiating the power of neoliberalism and our qualitative passion for social justice. Although this mourning manifests itself on multiple fronts, after outlining our ethics and sharing personal vignet…
Reading the Black Woman’s Body Via Instagram Fame
Researching the bridge called our backs: The invisibility of ‘us’ in qualitative communities
The article and the following discussion were prompted after the authors’ participation in a recent qualitative research conference. In the article, a Black woman and Latina scholar share their experiences and reflections as scholar researchers. As a point of entry, they discuss how even qualitative research communities can be marginalizing spaces for scholars of color. Using theoretical perspectives of feminists of color, the authors provide sna…
When Black Girls Fight: Interrogating, Interrupting, and (Re)Imagining Dangerous Scripts of Femininity in Urban Classrooms
The recent death of Amy Joyner, a promising Wilmington, Delaware, high school sophomore demonstrates very clearly the ways in which Black girls are made vulnerable in urban schools. Joyner, an honor roll student, was jumped by a group of girls in the bathroom just before classes began. The alleged cause of the fight was jealousy over a boy. Black girls are bombarded with popular culture messages defining Black femininity along narrow notions of s…
Doctoral Students' Experiences with Pedagogies of the Home, Pedagogies of Love, and Mentoring in the Academy
In this article, a group of nontraditional and/or doctoral students of color and our advisor discuss how the advisor-advisee mentoring relationship has positively affected our experiences within academia. The mentoring relationship, cultivated within a group mentoring model, was integral to our acclimation of the hidden culture of our doctoral programs. We elaborate on the history and mentoring model of the group of which we are a part, and follo…
Where is the love? An interrogation of love in VH1’s Love and Hip Hop New York and a call to educators to respond to anti-love messages
You Have to Hold Your Own”: Investigating the Social Networks of a Diverse Group of Disenfranchised Urban Male Youth
Using Popular Culture Texts in the Classroom to Interrogate Issues of Gender Transgression Related Bullying
This article examines how undergraduate instructors of pre-service educators can address complex issues of sexuality and sexual orientation within the classroom. First, we explain our own backgrounds and positionalities to provide a context for our ensuing ideas and discussions. Second, by reviewing the literature on homophobic bullying, we outline why it is imperative that preservice teachers understand and mobilize around issues of gay, lesbian…
Pain Is a Social Construction Until It Hurts: Living Theory on My Body
This is a narrative about embodiment, difference, and, most of all, pain. What happens when the body is broken and pain becomes the center of one's daily life? How does one learn to accept disability? Written at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and autoethnography, I utilize poetry to communicate the transformation of my mind and body after a car accident forced me to reevaluate how I understood embodiment
Hill girls, consumption practices, power, and city style: Raced and classed production of femininities in a higher education setting
This study investigated the ways a diverse group of university women in the USA utilised racialised and classed discourses of femininity in the creation of subjectivities. Interview and focus group data were collected over a two‐year time period and focused on how women navigated the higher education setting. Two forms of femininity, ‘Hill girl’ and ‘City style’, were salient. Hill girl femininity was based on markers such as white skin that had …
Vampires, Vixens, and Feminists: An Analysis of Twilight
The movie Twilight, directed by Catherin Hardwicke and produced by Summit Entertainment, was released in November of 2008. The screenplay was based on the 2005 novel of the same name, which was the
What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty: An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom
This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse …
Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee. Los Angeles: Focus Films, 2005
When University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was brutally killed for being gay in 1998, hate crimes against homosexuals began to be acknowledged as malicious acts. For students who identified
The Performance of White Masculinity in Boys Don't Cry: Identity, Desire, (Mis)Recognition
Using a theoretical discussion of gender performance and border patrol/inspection to situate the analysis, this article examines the film Boys Don't Cry to investigate the performances of White masculinity and how Brandon Teena's body becomes constructed as a 'contested site.' The author argues that the film reinscribes the normative nature of White masculinity by showcasing Brandon Teena's 'failed' performance as a performance while allowing the…
Using Others in the Nicest Way Possible: On Colonial and Academic Practice(s), and an Ethic of Humility
In this article, we draw from two independent, completed projects that forced us to struggle with our ethics and how we understood the nature of the researcher-participant relationship. We move past the presumption that we social justice-minded qualitative researchers are "needed" to discuss how we understand ourselves to be meeting that need. Here, our intent is to trouble qualitative researchers' underlying assumptions about help and harm when …
When Black Girls Fight: Interrogating, Interrupting, and (Re)Imagining Dangerous Scripts of Femininity in Urban Classrooms
The recent death of Amy Joyner, a promising Wilmington, Delaware, high school sophomore demonstrates very clearly the ways in which Black girls are made vulnerable in urban schools. Joyner, an honor roll student, was jumped by a group of girls in the bathroom just before classes began. The alleged cause of the fight was jealousy over a boy. Black girls are bombarded with popular culture messages defining Black femininity along narrow notions of s…
Researching the bridge called our backs: The invisibility of ‘us’ in qualitative communities
The article and the following discussion were prompted after the authors’ participation in a recent qualitative research conference. In the article, a Black woman and Latina scholar share their experiences and reflections as scholar researchers. As a point of entry, they discuss how even qualitative research communities can be marginalizing spaces for scholars of color. Using theoretical perspectives of feminists of color, the authors provide sna…
Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix
Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix explores how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social categories are represented in, and constructed by, some of the most significant popular culture artifacts in contemporary Western culture. Through readings of racialized television sitcoms, LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream American music, the role of Black Panther in Western imperialist projects, a…
Hill girls, consumption practices, power, and city style: Raced and classed production of femininities in a higher education setting
This study investigated the ways a diverse group of university women in the USA utilised racialised and classed discourses of femininity in the creation of subjectivities. Interview and focus group data were collected over a two‐year time period and focused on how women navigated the higher education setting. Two forms of femininity, ‘Hill girl’ and ‘City style’, were salient. Hill girl femininity was based on markers such as white skin that had …
Reading the Black Woman’s Body Via Instagram Fame
The Performance of White Masculinity in Boys Don't Cry: Identity, Desire, (Mis)Recognition
Using a theoretical discussion of gender performance and border patrol/inspection to situate the analysis, this article examines the film Boys Don't Cry to investigate the performances of White masculinity and how Brandon Teena's body becomes constructed as a 'contested site.' The author argues that the film reinscribes the normative nature of White masculinity by showcasing Brandon Teena's 'failed' performance as a performance while allowing the…
Using Popular Culture Texts in the Classroom to Interrogate Issues of Gender Transgression Related Bullying
This article examines how undergraduate instructors of pre-service educators can address complex issues of sexuality and sexual orientation within the classroom. First, we explain our own backgrounds and positionalities to provide a context for our ensuing ideas and discussions. Second, by reviewing the literature on homophobic bullying, we outline why it is imperative that preservice teachers understand and mobilize around issues of gay, lesbian…
Pain Is a Social Construction Until It Hurts: Living Theory on My Body
This is a narrative about embodiment, difference, and, most of all, pain. What happens when the body is broken and pain becomes the center of one's daily life? How does one learn to accept disability? Written at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and autoethnography, I utilize poetry to communicate the transformation of my mind and body after a car accident forced me to reevaluate how I understood embodiment
Where is the love? An interrogation of love in VH1’s Love and Hip Hop New York and a call to educators to respond to anti-love messages
What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty: An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom
This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse …
It’s Not Enough to Just Insert a Few People of Color: ” An Intersectional Analysis of Failed Leadership in Netflix’s The Chair Series
Leadership roles in higher education are still held predominately by white male leaders while women of color, especially, struggle to be recognized, hired, and/or appointed as leaders. In popular culture, though there have been films and television series that focus on student life on campus, there have been few representations of life as a leader in higher education. A new six-episode Netflix series, The Chair, about the first woman of color dep…
Doctoral Students' Experiences with Pedagogies of the Home, Pedagogies of Love, and Mentoring in the Academy
In this article, a group of nontraditional and/or doctoral students of color and our advisor discuss how the advisor-advisee mentoring relationship has positively affected our experiences within academia. The mentoring relationship, cultivated within a group mentoring model, was integral to our acclimation of the hidden culture of our doctoral programs. We elaborate on the history and mentoring model of the group of which we are a part, and follo…
Vampires, Vixens, and Feminists: An Analysis of Twilight
The movie Twilight, directed by Catherin Hardwicke and produced by Summit Entertainment, was released in November of 2008. The screenplay was based on the 2005 novel of the same name, which was the
Media Review
Media Review
The Performance of White Masculinity in Boys Don't Cry: Identity, Desire, (Mis)Recognition
Using a theoretical discussion of gender performance and border patrol/inspection to situate the analysis, this article examines the film Boys Don't Cry to investigate the performances of White masculinity and how Brandon Teena's body becomes constructed as a 'contested site.' The author argues that the film reinscribes the normative nature of White masculinity by showcasing Brandon Teena's 'failed' performance as a performance while allowing the…
Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee. Los Angeles: Focus Films, 2005
When University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was brutally killed for being gay in 1998, hate crimes against homosexuals began to be acknowledged as malicious acts. For students who identified
What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty: An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom
This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse …
Hill girls, consumption practices, power, and city style: Raced and classed production of femininities in a higher education setting
This study investigated the ways a diverse group of university women in the USA utilised racialised and classed discourses of femininity in the creation of subjectivities. Interview and focus group data were collected over a two‐year time period and focused on how women navigated the higher education setting. Two forms of femininity, ‘Hill girl’ and ‘City style’, were salient. Hill girl femininity was based on markers such as white skin that had …
Vampires, Vixens, and Feminists: An Analysis of Twilight
The movie Twilight, directed by Catherin Hardwicke and produced by Summit Entertainment, was released in November of 2008. The screenplay was based on the 2005 novel of the same name, which was the
Pain Is a Social Construction Until It Hurts: Living Theory on My Body
This is a narrative about embodiment, difference, and, most of all, pain. What happens when the body is broken and pain becomes the center of one's daily life? How does one learn to accept disability? Written at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and autoethnography, I utilize poetry to communicate the transformation of my mind and body after a car accident forced me to reevaluate how I understood embodiment
You Have to Hold Your Own”: Investigating the Social Networks of a Diverse Group of Disenfranchised Urban Male Youth
Using Popular Culture Texts in the Classroom to Interrogate Issues of Gender Transgression Related Bullying
This article examines how undergraduate instructors of pre-service educators can address complex issues of sexuality and sexual orientation within the classroom. First, we explain our own backgrounds and positionalities to provide a context for our ensuing ideas and discussions. Second, by reviewing the literature on homophobic bullying, we outline why it is imperative that preservice teachers understand and mobilize around issues of gay, lesbian…
Where is the love? An interrogation of love in VH1’s Love and Hip Hop New York and a call to educators to respond to anti-love messages
Doctoral Students' Experiences with Pedagogies of the Home, Pedagogies of Love, and Mentoring in the Academy
In this article, a group of nontraditional and/or doctoral students of color and our advisor discuss how the advisor-advisee mentoring relationship has positively affected our experiences within academia. The mentoring relationship, cultivated within a group mentoring model, was integral to our acclimation of the hidden culture of our doctoral programs. We elaborate on the history and mentoring model of the group of which we are a part, and follo…
Ethical Quandaries: Qualitative Research in a Neoliberal Age
We have witnessed our universities becoming neoliberal institutions as monetary goals surmount academic ones and knowledge becomes a commodity. As professors in a neoliberal institution, we mourn in this moment as we are forced to become skilled at negotiating the power of neoliberalism and our qualitative passion for social justice. Although this mourning manifests itself on multiple fronts, after outlining our ethics and sharing personal vignet…
Reading the Black Woman’s Body Via Instagram Fame
Researching the bridge called our backs: The invisibility of ‘us’ in qualitative communities
The article and the following discussion were prompted after the authors’ participation in a recent qualitative research conference. In the article, a Black woman and Latina scholar share their experiences and reflections as scholar researchers. As a point of entry, they discuss how even qualitative research communities can be marginalizing spaces for scholars of color. Using theoretical perspectives of feminists of color, the authors provide sna…
When Black Girls Fight: Interrogating, Interrupting, and (Re)Imagining Dangerous Scripts of Femininity in Urban Classrooms
The recent death of Amy Joyner, a promising Wilmington, Delaware, high school sophomore demonstrates very clearly the ways in which Black girls are made vulnerable in urban schools. Joyner, an honor roll student, was jumped by a group of girls in the bathroom just before classes began. The alleged cause of the fight was jealousy over a boy. Black girls are bombarded with popular culture messages defining Black femininity along narrow notions of s…
Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix
Intersectional Analysis as a Method to Analyze Popular Culture: Clarity in the Matrix explores how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social categories are represented in, and constructed by, some of the most significant popular culture artifacts in contemporary Western culture. Through readings of racialized television sitcoms, LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream American music, the role of Black Panther in Western imperialist projects, a…
Using Others in the Nicest Way Possible: On Colonial and Academic Practice(s), and an Ethic of Humility
In this article, we draw from two independent, completed projects that forced us to struggle with our ethics and how we understood the nature of the researcher-participant relationship. We move past the presumption that we social justice-minded qualitative researchers are "needed" to discuss how we understand ourselves to be meeting that need. Here, our intent is to trouble qualitative researchers' underlying assumptions about help and harm when …
Multimodal Expressions of Self: Telling Ghost Stories as Intersectional African American and Latinx American Scholars
Using autoethnography to critically analyze personal and cultural experiences, we use the notion of “home” metaphorically through (a) academia—of our traumatic experiences as African American and Latinx women seeking acceptance in academic institutions despite blatant inequities, discrimination, and racism; and (b) intergenerational family and ancestral narratives—of past/present experiences and stories of identities, homes, and borders. We craft…
Would You Wear That to Church?!”: The Production of “Ladies” in an All Girls’ After-School Club in the Southeast United States
This study investigated how Black middle school girls negotiated an after-school club, with a specific focus on ways of knowing and acting as “ladies.” Drawing from Fordham’s intersectional analyses of the histories and politics behind her conceptualization of “those loud black girls,” we explore and critique the ways in which the girls were subjects of, and subjected to, context-specific discourses of race, class, and gender. Critical race theor…
It’s Not Enough to Just Insert a Few People of Color: ” An Intersectional Analysis of Failed Leadership in Netflix’s The Chair Series
Leadership roles in higher education are still held predominately by white male leaders while women of color, especially, struggle to be recognized, hired, and/or appointed as leaders. In popular culture, though there have been films and television series that focus on student life on campus, there have been few representations of life as a leader in higher education. A new six-episode Netflix series, The Chair, about the first woman of color dep…
Popular Culture as an Educative Site Regarding the January 6, 2021 Insurrection: Grappling With Complexity Through Intersectional Analyses a Special Issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
The insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 is distinct because of its deep ties to White supremacist rhetoric and mobilization. What is also significant is the undeniable role of popular media in establishing the discourse, leadership, and plans that made the event possible. This special issue uses intersectional analysis to interrogate why/how the uprising occurred, and to imagine education as a critical intervention t…
“It’s a Calling. You Answered.”
Abbott Elementary, a mockumentary comedy series airing on ABC, examines the plight of an underfunded, underresourced elementary school in Philadelphia. In this article, we argue that Abbott Elementary is a compelling look inside an, albeit fictional, urban school located in the city of Philadelphia. The mockumentary form of the series positions the viewer as ethnographer so that we, in essence, engage in data collection as we listen to documentar…
The Black female principal in reel/real life: An intersectional examination of Ava Coleman on Abbott Elementary
Running Toward Freedom: Developing Fugitive Methodology Through Care and Collective Healing
This article reflects on a qualitative study of Black women principals who led schools through forced closures and the liberatory potential of what we term “Fugitive Methodology.” Instead of centering the original research study, we utilize it to reflect on the potential of Fugitive Methodology as a way of engaging in research with communities who have historically been harmed by traditional approaches. Through recorded conversations and collabor…
Crisis leadership in Georgia: Navigating policy, people, and dual pandemics in K-12 education
This research investigated how K-12 school and district leaders in Georgia enacted leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews with 11 educational leaders (10 of whom identified as African American), this study explored how proximity to policy and people shaped leaders’ actions and understandings of crisis leadership. Findings reveal that while all participants experienced the pandemic as an acute and ongoing emergency, their l…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Critical Race Theory in Education (12 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Art (9 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (8 works) · Media studies (8 works) · Pedagogy (7 works)