Bio:
Gaye Theresa Johnson is Associate Professor of Black Studies and the Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at UCSB. A historian of freedom struggles and cultural politics, she is also a lead facilitator and trainer in healing justice for numerous movement spaces across the nation.
Among her many publications are Futures of Black Radicalism, co-edited with Alex Lubin (Verso Press); Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement (UC Press); and Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion, with sports scholars David J. Leonard and Rodolfo Mondragón (University of Illinois Press). She has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has received numerous awards for community-engaged research and teaching.
Johnson is a community-engaged scholar and an advocate for grassroots organizing, primarily in farmworkers’ rights, reproductive justice, and housing justice. She is a past Board President of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) in Ventura, California, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and an advisory board member for the Goldin Institute and the Rosenberg Fund for Children. She wrote the curriculum and trained high school teachers to offer the first Ethnic and Social Justice Studies in the Ventura Unified School District, and worked with a coalition of community members to compel the school board to make the course a requirement for K-12 education.
Johnson's proudest achievement is being a mother and a part of the circle of friends and family that constitute the core of her life.