Jameelah Imani Morris

Sociocultural Anthropology; Black Geographies, Historical Anthropology; Political Mobilization; Political Ecologies, Racial Formations; Youth; Black Feminist Thought; African Diaspora; Latin America; Caribbean; Colombia

Dr. Jameelah Imani Morris is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS). She is an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose sociocultural anthropological research focuses on political mobilization, gendered-racialized state violence, and urban geographies in Latin America and the Caribbean as part of the global Black diaspora. Her collaboratively approached scholarship asks how Black communities live with(in) and theorize the ongoingness of terror in the afterlife of racial slavery, such that absence and elsewhere emerge as lived and expressive geographies; as well as how the inheritance of colonial legacies becomes entangled with other inheritances that unsettle time, space, and the very terms of the human?

Morris’s current project focuses on how Black placemaking is produced, inherited, and deployed through the political mobilization of multigenerational, youth-led movements that contest while living through the expansion of Colombia’s tourism industry in Cartagena de Indias. Ongoing collaborative community-based projects are a key part of her work. She co-founded and co-directs, alongside Dr. Orlando Deavila Pertuz (University of Cartagena), a collaborative community-based digital archive project called Memorias de Resistencia (Memories of Resistance) (https://cdscollective.org/grantees-microgrants/) focused on Black women-led organizing for urban infrastructure, housing rights, and justice in Cartagena, Colombia throughout the second half of the 20th century.

Her research and scholarship have been supported by a number of grants and fellowships including the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, as well as Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies. She is also part of the Book and Film Review team of Transforming Anthropology (the flagship journal for the Association of Black Anthropologists). Before joining Western, she was a Predoctoral Dissertation Research Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She also has extensive experience in the non-profit sector.

"(A)Drift: A Method and Theory of Black Temporality in Map." TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 46 (2023): 195-201. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895510.

I approach teaching as an opportunity to empower students to interrogate the structures, relationships, and categories that inform how we understand ourselves and others. My courses are focused on developing critical analysis skills, interdisciplinary and multimodal methods, and intellectual dexterity.

I teach classes on race and gender inequality and violence, Black girlhood, citizenship, social movements, tourism, youth, the state, urban development and dispossession, historical memory, time and temporality, and the ethical and political questions and dilemmas of anthropological inquiry. 

Currently, I teach:  

ANTHRO 2293F-001: Rights, Resistance, and the Anthropology of Social Movements (Fall 2025)

ANTHRO 3326G-001: Inheritance: Time, Memory, and Racial Afterlives (Winter 2026)

GSWS 3420G: Black Intellectual Traditions (Winter 2026)