STUDENTS [PHD]
NATASHA JOHNSON ASKS: HOW CAN WE HELP BLACK YOUTH THRIVE?
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atasha Johnson is a Joint PhD candidate in Social Work and Psychology studying resilience in Black youth. Her research examines how Black youth understand racial oppression. Her goal is to work in the K-12 school systems with Black students and marginalized students, and to learn what helps them to thrive academically. “We know education is one of the singular most important things that affect social mobility and health,” she says. “A lot of disparities that we see in communities are tied to race. I see myself addressing those disparities through mental health advocacy and interventions.” Johnson’s area of psychology is personality and social context, which focuses on individuals through both micro and macro levels of identity and society. “Essentially I’m thinking about people in their environment. We can look at other factors that help us to understand a person: their family environment, their social environment, their social experiences, their experiences with peers.
“I do a lot of work around adolescence. There’s a transition between having more autonomy in your social spaces, and having more interactions with adults who are not your parents. So if I’m looking at how Black youth become aware of racial oppression, I have to look at the individual within these larger contexts,” she explains. “I take a holistic approach with my research. What are some things that are stressors within their environments? Who are in communities with adolescents? And how can those adults best support youth to thrive in educational contexts?” As an undergraduate at Spelman College in Georgia, Johnson worked in the Atlanta public school system, but she never considered a future in education. Then she was assigned an MSW field placement at an alternative high school in Southfield, Michigan. “I had a moment where I thought, ‘Oh...I get it. This is where I need to be.’ I hadn’t recognized the pattern, but my trajectory placed me in this work,” she explains. “Now, I can’t think of a better place to do my work than school spaces.
“It was an easy decision to come back home to Michigan for my doctoral program,” she says. “I was here as an employee working with graduate students and with professors who had active research labs; I couldn’t think of any other place I wanted to be. Now, I am doing the work that I want to do with the professors whom I want to do it with, who are renowned in their fields.” Johnson had an aha moment in Professor Daphne Watkins’ course on community interventions. “The single most important thing I learned is that community members are the experts of their lived experiences. All of this research that we do is amazing, right? We spend a lot of time doing it, disentangling it, unpacking it, and then developing and creating knowledge, but when you are doing work with communities, you start with them, with their needs and without preconceived notions. “I’m being intentional to prepare myself as a scholar and to do the best work I can do.”
“I’m being intentional to prepare myself as a scholar and to do the best work I can do.” – Natasha Johnson, Joint PhD Candidate
ONGOING · Summer 2020 · 13
