Decolonial Learning, Organizational Leadership & Liberation Science

Scholarship & Research

My academic work investigates what the survival systems of marginalized communities can teach us about organizational intelligence, and how that learning informs the way we design, lead, and transform organizations. I build methodology to make that intelligence teachable, drawing on nervous system science, ancestral epistemology, and the lived experience of those who have led under conditions of persistent harm.

And yet the work is larger than organizations. Across classrooms, boardrooms, families, communities, and our relationship to the living earth, I am fundamentally interested in how relational fields are shaped, and how embodied knowing, ancestral epistemology, and nervous system sovereignty function as pedagogies of liberation in every context where human beings shape one another.

Research Focus

Current research interests include:

• decolonial and liberatory pedagogy across organizational, educational, and relational systems
• trauma-informed organizational learning and culture transformation
• Black feminist and womanist epistemology as organizational theory
• affective decolonization and the nervous system as a site of cultural transformation
• somatic literacy and embodied learning as leadership methodology
• autoethnographic and participatory action research methodologies
• ancestral epistemology and indigenous knowledge systems as frameworks for organizational design
• apithology and emergent thriving systems
• critical race theory in organizational psychology and human development
• the intelligence of survival systems — Black women's leadership under conditions of structural harm

My work sits at the convergence of neuroscience, ancestral epistemology, qualitative inquiry, and the study of coherence within complex adaptive systems: from the individual nervous system to the organizational field to the living earth.

Current Projects

• Ed.D. in Organizational Learning and Leadership — in progress
• The Life Curriculum — a framework for the formalization of knowledge as it moves through a life