Dr. Symone A. Johnson (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul. She earned a Ph.D. (2022) and M.A. (2019) in Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. (2017) in Psychology with a concentration in Comparative Women’s Studies from Spelman College.
Her areas of research and teaching include African American folklore and expressive culture, the Black anthropological tradition, critical medical anthropology, Black feminist theories, Chicago surrealist group and Afrosurrealist traditions, and urban environment and ecology studies. Her ethnographic research, based in New York City and Chicago, explores the relationships between contemporary praxes of personal healing, communal care, and the evolution of social change theories like restorative, transformative, and healing justice. She critically examines how people’s racialized, classed, and gendered experiences mediate how they navigate different worlds of care.
Her courses at DePaul include: African American Peoples, Cultures, Ideas, and Movements; Black Feminist Theories; Anthropology of the African Diaspora.
Johnson’s public writings can be found in Anthropology News, the American Anthropological Association’s award-winning member magazine. Her peer-reviewed article, “We All We Got: Black Urban Ecologies of Care and Mutual Aid”, co-authored with Dr. Ashanté M. Reese (The University of Texas at Austin), is forthcoming in Environment and Society this Fall 2022.