Charity Clay, PhD

Charity Clay is an assistant professor in the sociology department at Xavier University of Louisiana, an HBCU in New Orleans.  She is the head of the concentration in crime and social justice and is an affiliated faculty member with the African American and Diaspora Studies and Women studies minor programs. In addition to teaching, she serves as a mentor for various student undergraduate research projects and has developed and published on the importance of faculty-led study abroad programs for HBCU students.

As a sociologist of the African Diaspora, her research interests are varied but center around the dispersal, preservation, maintenance, and adaptability of African culture through the diaspora; Pan-African movements from the 1960s to the present; Impacts, responses and alternatives to Police Violence in Black communities; and Racialized gender oppression and its impacts on relationships within the Black community.

Her most recent work provides critical analysis of #BlackLivesMatter as the first movement of the Black Freedom Struggle in the digital age. This work looks at the impact of master narratives on constructing protest identity for young Black activists in relation to their elders of the Civil Rights Movement.  It also investigates the role of media and corporations in #BlackLivesMatter, expanding the interest-convergence that was applied to the Civil Rights Movement to show how systems of oppression adapt to neutralize new forms of resistance.

Her current project centers around developing a conceptual framework to understand the collective non-fatal impacts of Systemic Police Terror on Black Communities.  This is a mixed methodology project that expand the focus beyond fatal incidents of police violence and explores the negative health outcomes for those living in a police state.

Outside of academia, she is a burgeoning creative visual storyteller that provides a sociological lens to projects that celebrate global Blackness through music and film.