W K Okello
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 71571 |
|---|---|
| NOME | W K Okello |
| PRENOMES | W K |
| SOBRENOME | Okello |
| ASSINATURA | OKELLO W K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of North Carolina Wilmington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5056-1514 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 53 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2017 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Refusal, governance, and the pedagogical imagination
Our study examines how a course structured on a critical, cultural approach to governance might advance refusal as pedagogical praxis. We employ refusal as a theoretical framework to guide an examination of teaching methods in a graduate-level course titled: Black Research Approaches in Education. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we center two perspectives from our positions as the professor and student to explore our sensemaking …
Myth, Metaphor, and the Method of Black Worldmaking
This piece stages an encounter between myth and metaphor, positioning Black poetics as an intervention on the Human project and a practice of rewriting the world. Centering poiesis , the creative act of bringing into existence that which otherwise did not exist, the work unfolds through rhythm, memory, and aesthetic experimentation as modes of worldmaking. Drawing on Black feminist auto/ethnography, the piece engages the body and self as sites of…
Inhabiting the Present
Autoethnography, like the song “This Joy,” can be an embodied instantiation of how to be. Drawing on the song as a point of departure, this essay explores how Black feminist autoethnography asserts ontological claims on the present, positioning itself as a practice of embodied, ethical attunement to everyday instantiations of Black living. Traveling across time, I return to my boyhood lessons on and about joy and move forward to a contemporary en…
Against the grain
Breaking Bread
A Critical Knowledge Praxis Framework for Educational Policymakers and Practitioners
Drawing on critically oriented principles, we invite policymakers and practitioners to extend traditional commitments to bridging the gap between research and policy and practice. To achieve this goal, we move beyond hegemonic norms that privilege traditional forms of research and instead adopt a more inclusive and expansive emphasis on knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce critical praxis as a way to reframe engagement with knowledge as a critica…
Sculpting Knowledge
Centering Blackness in educational research is a pursuit of liberation grounded in process, inquiry, and relational praxis. This approach recognizes liberation as an ongoing, unfinished endeavor, urging researchers to disrupt the normative systems that constrain Black life and knowledge. Black methodologies emerge as flexible and transformative, drawing on Black creative and intellectual labor to challenge dominant epistemologies. In this context…
Unspeakable Joy
This manuscript thinks with Harriet Jacobs; I am concerned with the otherwise worlds, the productions of Black Joy that Black people devise while in the crawlspace, understood here as higher education contexts. Whereas the condition of Black life is in an antagonistic relationship with society, I ask, what is the sound, look, and feeling of Black Joy? Unspeakable joy, or what I define as the praxes of interior elaboration, cramped creation, and o…
Infinite Essence
Anti-Blackness, as a sociopolitical matrix, fails to acknowledge Black livingness, necessitating a departure from traditional representational modalities to engage with Black "living" in its fullness. Black aesthetics emerge as imaginative spaces, inspiring change and expansiveness, challenging normativity by centering Blackness. Mikael Owunna embodies this tradition, melding visual media, engineering, and African cosmologies in projects like Inf…
“Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter”
The authors argue that embracing life necessitates a shift in how we conceptualize wellness in education. They delve into the exploration of humanizing wellness and living well by drawing on Black onto-epistemologies, specifically referencing Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. This exploration involves examining how notions of wholeness manifest in the text and the subsequent implications for educators and scholars actively involved in anti-equity effort…
Affirmations of Black Being
Research has chronicled the experiences of Black students transitioning into college and best practices for supporting Black students as they move through the collegiate context. The collegiate context is nested in white supremacy, and a microcosm of white culture. Thus, this study is rooted in the assumption that racism experienced within college is a reflection of its permanence, and sets the stage for the importance of examining Black students…
Bone-Deep Engagement
What constitutes an ethical analytical response to Black living? This manuscript thinks with theories of Blackness to explicate how the question of the human, specifically, what it means to be human, interrupts traditional methodological discourse, and requires a critical form of labor to account for the breadth and depth of Black liveliness and living. Diverging from traditional distance-oriented research practices, the author puts forth “Black …
Look a Negro!”
In this manuscript, I lift Black feminisms as a methodological intervention on a holistic meaning-making theory and its relationship to anti-Blackness. Specifically, I employed a Black feminist literary criticism, which presumes that Black people have cultivated living and survival practices throughout their history in the United States. I analyzed 7 full-length books and essays written by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Additionally, in attending…
Letting Go”
As scholars, teachers, and researchers within academe we have, at times, felt the gravity, nuance, and depth of Black feminist theories and epistemologies have resulted in articulations and manifestations so flat they are rendered illegible and almost always universally synonymous. While there are certainly deep and rich connections among and between Black feminist theories, and while their proliferation has been often mutually facilitative, they…
Speaking our imaginings into existence
We’ve never seen this”
Using the chokehold as a theoretical framework to analyze the gendered and sexualized vulnerabilities of Black males, I place historical records in conversation with the temporal moment, particularly the allegations of sexual violence committed against Black males at the University of Michigan. In doing so, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of media documents, asking how does White supremacy function to both terrorize Black males’ bodies …
What are you pretending not to know?”
Carcerality is more than a physical occurrence, but a lasting psychological, spiritual, and emotional state of being that gets in the body and directs how one may move in and through the world. As a contour of whiteness, carcerality normalizes ways of being that are consistent with rationality and reason privileging mind over body; intellectual over experiential ways of knowing; and mental abstractions over passions, bodily sensations, and tactil…
[Existing] While Black”
This manuscript carefully examines racialized surveillance, a mechanism of anti-Black violence, or what Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery, that persists in society despite the formal end of enslavement. To accomplish this, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of an incident in the public sphere and one in an educational context to show the ways anti-Black sentiments flow between them in similar ways. Specifically, this analysis exa…
“This Ain’t Hypothetical”
Black aesthetics is not a passive project; instead, it is deeply invested in curating livable logics to contend with anti-Black racism in and beyond the educational context. Embracing both theory and practice, rigorous and ethical engagement with Black aesthetics ought to be centrally concerned with what it means to exist as Black in an anti-Black world. Thus, this manuscript lifts the insights of one Black man and one Black woman and their relat…
“This is the reality that we live in”
Higher education in the United States, mainly since Brown v. Board of Education 1954, has lifted a philosophical impetus solidifying integrationist policies, practices, and pedagogy “as not only the most desirable, but most realizable condition of Black (co)existence in America” (Curry, 2008 Curry, T. (2008). Saved by the Bell: Derrick Bell's racial realism as pedagogy. Philosophical Studies in Education, 39, 35–46. [Google Scholar], p. 36). The …
Dreaming from the hold
Thinking with theory in college student success research
Using Jackson and Mazzei’s thinking with theory, this paper centers the stories of three researchers who practiced critical self-reflection while engaging in secondary analysis of data from The Pedagogy of Student Success Project, a study intended to learn about graduate students’ evolving conceptualizations of student success. In particular, the researchers were interested in how their individual theoretical leanings influenced how they interact…
Between me and the world
Letters enable writers to convey potentially difficult information in creative ways that are different from academic writing conventions. The subject of this article is healing from racial battle fatigue–the psychological, physiological, and emotional stress responses to racism. We use letters addressed to Black educators to illustrate how we wrestle with the question: What does it mean to live in our Black bodies in this historical moment? We al…
Here and There, Then and Now
Black feminisms challenge Western conceptions of linearity as an optic for understanding the experiences of Black folx in the United States social imaginary. As such, this article centers the understanding that for Black and minoritized folx, historical legacies carry the lingering effects of what may seem over and done with. These tensions converge on what M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) called the palimpsest, or 'a parchment that has been inscribed …
Organized anxiety
Henryism as a construct draws comparisons to what is commonly referred to as respectability politics, or the active adoption of standards rooted in whiteness as a regulatory instrument of one’s behavior and emotions. This manuscript will bring Henryism and respectability politics into conversation in an effort to illuminate the paradox of achievement for Black educators and professionals. By examining the experiences of Black women in higher educ…
From Self-Authorship to Self-Definition
The nuances that surface for minoritized bodies as a consequence of living in a Western, United States context requires reimagining theory, which does more than emphasize the psychological or the sociological. It necessitates a cross-disciplinary and historical analysis that deeply considers the affective and political. In this article, I borrow Black girlhood scholar Dominique Hill's language to frame the body (bodies) as a dynamic entity with p…
Here and There, Then and Now
Black feminisms challenge Western conceptions of linearity as an optic for understanding the experiences of Black folx in the United States social imaginary. As such, this article centers the understanding that for Black and minoritized folx, historical legacies carry the lingering effects of what may seem over and done with. These tensions converge on what M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) called the palimpsest, or 'a parchment that has been inscribed …
Affirmations of Black Being
Research has chronicled the experiences of Black students transitioning into college and best practices for supporting Black students as they move through the collegiate context. The collegiate context is nested in white supremacy, and a microcosm of white culture. Thus, this study is rooted in the assumption that racism experienced within college is a reflection of its permanence, and sets the stage for the importance of examining Black students…
[Existing] While Black”
This manuscript carefully examines racialized surveillance, a mechanism of anti-Black violence, or what Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery, that persists in society despite the formal end of enslavement. To accomplish this, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of an incident in the public sphere and one in an educational context to show the ways anti-Black sentiments flow between them in similar ways. Specifically, this analysis exa…
Speaking our imaginings into existence
Organized anxiety
Henryism as a construct draws comparisons to what is commonly referred to as respectability politics, or the active adoption of standards rooted in whiteness as a regulatory instrument of one’s behavior and emotions. This manuscript will bring Henryism and respectability politics into conversation in an effort to illuminate the paradox of achievement for Black educators and professionals. By examining the experiences of Black women in higher educ…
Toward an ethical Black men’s feminism
Wilson Kwamogi Okelloa* a Department of Educational Leadership, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC, USAWilson Kwamogi Okello, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches in the Higher Education program. Bridging the scholar-artist divide, his research draws on Black feminist theories to think about the relationship between history, the body, a…
What are you pretending not to know?”
Carcerality is more than a physical occurrence, but a lasting psychological, spiritual, and emotional state of being that gets in the body and directs how one may move in and through the world. As a contour of whiteness, carcerality normalizes ways of being that are consistent with rationality and reason privileging mind over body; intellectual over experiential ways of knowing; and mental abstractions over passions, bodily sensations, and tactil…
A Critical Knowledge Praxis Framework for Educational Policymakers and Practitioners
Drawing on critically oriented principles, we invite policymakers and practitioners to extend traditional commitments to bridging the gap between research and policy and practice. To achieve this goal, we move beyond hegemonic norms that privilege traditional forms of research and instead adopt a more inclusive and expansive emphasis on knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce critical praxis as a way to reframe engagement with knowledge as a critica…
Unspeakable Joy
This manuscript thinks with Harriet Jacobs; I am concerned with the otherwise worlds, the productions of Black Joy that Black people devise while in the crawlspace, understood here as higher education contexts. Whereas the condition of Black life is in an antagonistic relationship with society, I ask, what is the sound, look, and feeling of Black Joy? Unspeakable joy, or what I define as the praxes of interior elaboration, cramped creation, and o…
Bone-Deep Engagement
What constitutes an ethical analytical response to Black living? This manuscript thinks with theories of Blackness to explicate how the question of the human, specifically, what it means to be human, interrupts traditional methodological discourse, and requires a critical form of labor to account for the breadth and depth of Black liveliness and living. Diverging from traditional distance-oriented research practices, the author puts forth “Black …
Look a Negro!”
In this manuscript, I lift Black feminisms as a methodological intervention on a holistic meaning-making theory and its relationship to anti-Blackness. Specifically, I employed a Black feminist literary criticism, which presumes that Black people have cultivated living and survival practices throughout their history in the United States. I analyzed 7 full-length books and essays written by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Additionally, in attending…
Letting Go”
As scholars, teachers, and researchers within academe we have, at times, felt the gravity, nuance, and depth of Black feminist theories and epistemologies have resulted in articulations and manifestations so flat they are rendered illegible and almost always universally synonymous. While there are certainly deep and rich connections among and between Black feminist theories, and while their proliferation has been often mutually facilitative, they…
Dreaming from the hold
Beyond machismo
Que no se nos olviden los hombres [Let us not forget the men] (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 83). Almost three decades have passed since Gloria Anzaldua published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, whi
Beyond machismo
Que no se nos olviden los hombres [Let us not forget the men] (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 83). Almost three decades have passed since Gloria Anzaldua published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, whi
From Self-Authorship to Self-Definition
The nuances that surface for minoritized bodies as a consequence of living in a Western, United States context requires reimagining theory, which does more than emphasize the psychological or the sociological. It necessitates a cross-disciplinary and historical analysis that deeply considers the affective and political. In this article, I borrow Black girlhood scholar Dominique Hill's language to frame the body (bodies) as a dynamic entity with p…
“I wanted the world to see”
This chapter explains the scent and sensibility of linen incense burning late into the evening, its aromatic opulence lingering as if it too was bracing itself for the news to come. Smoke raised itself from the controlled flame like ancestors coming to bear witness, to signal devastation or cast warning in the belief of rainbows, either way there was a message on the way and they started preparing ourselves for it. Building on K. McKittrick’s in …
Toward an ethical Black men’s feminism
Wilson Kwamogi Okelloa* a Department of Educational Leadership, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC, USAWilson Kwamogi Okello, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches in the Higher Education program. Bridging the scholar-artist divide, his research draws on Black feminist theories to think about the relationship between history, the body, a…
Organized anxiety
Henryism as a construct draws comparisons to what is commonly referred to as respectability politics, or the active adoption of standards rooted in whiteness as a regulatory instrument of one’s behavior and emotions. This manuscript will bring Henryism and respectability politics into conversation in an effort to illuminate the paradox of achievement for Black educators and professionals. By examining the experiences of Black women in higher educ…
Standing in the kitchen’
Threaded with racialized and gendered pathologies, Black folx wrestle with a normative gaze that understands them as irrational, unintelligent, and deserving of constant surveillance. In this way, Black folx are expected to model postures of whiteness that agree with the wardrobe of anti-Blackness. In this manuscript, we take up the pedagogical work of what Denise Taliferro Baszile called critical race testimonies as a form of counter storytellin…
“This Ain’t Hypothetical”
Black aesthetics is not a passive project; instead, it is deeply invested in curating livable logics to contend with anti-Black racism in and beyond the educational context. Embracing both theory and practice, rigorous and ethical engagement with Black aesthetics ought to be centrally concerned with what it means to exist as Black in an anti-Black world. Thus, this manuscript lifts the insights of one Black man and one Black woman and their relat…
“This is the reality that we live in”
Higher education in the United States, mainly since Brown v. Board of Education 1954, has lifted a philosophical impetus solidifying integrationist policies, practices, and pedagogy “as not only the most desirable, but most realizable condition of Black (co)existence in America” (Curry, 2008 Curry, T. (2008). Saved by the Bell: Derrick Bell's racial realism as pedagogy. Philosophical Studies in Education, 39, 35–46. [Google Scholar], p. 36). The …
Dreaming from the hold
Thinking with theory in college student success research
Using Jackson and Mazzei’s thinking with theory, this paper centers the stories of three researchers who practiced critical self-reflection while engaging in secondary analysis of data from The Pedagogy of Student Success Project, a study intended to learn about graduate students’ evolving conceptualizations of student success. In particular, the researchers were interested in how their individual theoretical leanings influenced how they interact…
Between me and the world
Letters enable writers to convey potentially difficult information in creative ways that are different from academic writing conventions. The subject of this article is healing from racial battle fatigue–the psychological, physiological, and emotional stress responses to racism. We use letters addressed to Black educators to illustrate how we wrestle with the question: What does it mean to live in our Black bodies in this historical moment? We al…
Here and There, Then and Now
Black feminisms challenge Western conceptions of linearity as an optic for understanding the experiences of Black folx in the United States social imaginary. As such, this article centers the understanding that for Black and minoritized folx, historical legacies carry the lingering effects of what may seem over and done with. These tensions converge on what M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) called the palimpsest, or 'a parchment that has been inscribed …
Speaking our imaginings into existence
We’ve never seen this”
Using the chokehold as a theoretical framework to analyze the gendered and sexualized vulnerabilities of Black males, I place historical records in conversation with the temporal moment, particularly the allegations of sexual violence committed against Black males at the University of Michigan. In doing so, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of media documents, asking how does White supremacy function to both terrorize Black males’ bodies …
What are you pretending not to know?”
Carcerality is more than a physical occurrence, but a lasting psychological, spiritual, and emotional state of being that gets in the body and directs how one may move in and through the world. As a contour of whiteness, carcerality normalizes ways of being that are consistent with rationality and reason privileging mind over body; intellectual over experiential ways of knowing; and mental abstractions over passions, bodily sensations, and tactil…
[Existing] While Black”
This manuscript carefully examines racialized surveillance, a mechanism of anti-Black violence, or what Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery, that persists in society despite the formal end of enslavement. To accomplish this, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of an incident in the public sphere and one in an educational context to show the ways anti-Black sentiments flow between them in similar ways. Specifically, this analysis exa…
Look a Negro!”
In this manuscript, I lift Black feminisms as a methodological intervention on a holistic meaning-making theory and its relationship to anti-Blackness. Specifically, I employed a Black feminist literary criticism, which presumes that Black people have cultivated living and survival practices throughout their history in the United States. I analyzed 7 full-length books and essays written by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Additionally, in attending…
Letting Go”
As scholars, teachers, and researchers within academe we have, at times, felt the gravity, nuance, and depth of Black feminist theories and epistemologies have resulted in articulations and manifestations so flat they are rendered illegible and almost always universally synonymous. While there are certainly deep and rich connections among and between Black feminist theories, and while their proliferation has been often mutually facilitative, they…
“Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter”
The authors argue that embracing life necessitates a shift in how we conceptualize wellness in education. They delve into the exploration of humanizing wellness and living well by drawing on Black onto-epistemologies, specifically referencing Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. This exploration involves examining how notions of wholeness manifest in the text and the subsequent implications for educators and scholars actively involved in anti-equity effort…
Affirmations of Black Being
Research has chronicled the experiences of Black students transitioning into college and best practices for supporting Black students as they move through the collegiate context. The collegiate context is nested in white supremacy, and a microcosm of white culture. Thus, this study is rooted in the assumption that racism experienced within college is a reflection of its permanence, and sets the stage for the importance of examining Black students…
Bone-Deep Engagement
What constitutes an ethical analytical response to Black living? This manuscript thinks with theories of Blackness to explicate how the question of the human, specifically, what it means to be human, interrupts traditional methodological discourse, and requires a critical form of labor to account for the breadth and depth of Black liveliness and living. Diverging from traditional distance-oriented research practices, the author puts forth “Black …
Against the grain
Breaking Bread
A Critical Knowledge Praxis Framework for Educational Policymakers and Practitioners
Drawing on critically oriented principles, we invite policymakers and practitioners to extend traditional commitments to bridging the gap between research and policy and practice. To achieve this goal, we move beyond hegemonic norms that privilege traditional forms of research and instead adopt a more inclusive and expansive emphasis on knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce critical praxis as a way to reframe engagement with knowledge as a critica…
Sculpting Knowledge
Centering Blackness in educational research is a pursuit of liberation grounded in process, inquiry, and relational praxis. This approach recognizes liberation as an ongoing, unfinished endeavor, urging researchers to disrupt the normative systems that constrain Black life and knowledge. Black methodologies emerge as flexible and transformative, drawing on Black creative and intellectual labor to challenge dominant epistemologies. In this context…
Sociology (23 obras) · Critical Race Theory in Education (19 obras) · Gender Studies (14 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Aesthetics (12 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Art (11 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras) · Race, History, and American Society (11 obras) · Political science (9 obras)