Critical Pedagogy Lab Research Fellows
The Critical Pedagogy Lab (CPL) is dedicated to research and pedagogical innovation in higher education. It focuses on providing an inclusive environment and developing infrastructure for diversity in higher education. BBQ+ is excited to share that we have partnered with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for this exciting collaborative initiative!
Please click the link below to learn more about key goals that drive the Critical Pedagogy Lab or continue scrolling to meet our talented team of Scholar and Undergraduate Research Fellows!
Scholar Research Fellows
Melissa Brown
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Melissa C. Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. She researches digital media, artificial intelligence, and online social networking applications. At Santa Clara University, she teaches courses in Media and Technology Studies, Qualitative Research Methods, Dating in the Digital Age, and Race, Gender, and Digital Activism.
Dr. Brown collaborates with students across SCU’s College of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering on research exploring the sociological implications of digital platforms. This research group applies sociological theory and methods to examine how digital technologies affect social identity, groups, and structures. Their projects investigate how emerging technologies influence social stratification and the social psychological phenomena that emerge from or are transformed by human-computer interaction. Primary research topics include the anthropomorphization of AI, algorithmic visibility, digital activism, digital violence, online misinformation, and digital culture.
Outside of her research and teaching, Dr. Brown is also interested in adopting digital platforms such as podcasts, blogs, and social media as pedagogical tools both within and beyond the academy. When she is not working on her blog Blackfeminisms.com, she enjoys talking walks with her dog, listening to audiobooks, and playing video games.
Anthony Diaz-Vazquez
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Anthony Díaz-Vázquez is a Ph.D. candidate in Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona, with a minor in Environmental Learning (expected December 2026). His research examines how queer and trans students in higher education construct, negotiate, and express their identities through semiotic and discursive practices. Bridging sociocultural theory, critical pedagogy, and digital ethnography, his work explores how marginalized learners create spaces of resistance, belonging, and transformation across educational and online environments.
He holds an M.A. in Linguistics and a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico. His current projects analyze multimodal representations of trans lives in digital media, the learning processes shaping queer and trans student identities in informal/formal educational settings, and the counter-pedagogies emerging in virtual classrooms. Collectively, his scholarship highlights the power of discourse, visual meaning-making, and multimodality to challenge cisnormative and heteronormative structures and to envision more equitable and caring pedagogical futures.
At the University of Arizona, Anthony has served as a Teaching Graduate Associate in multiple undergraduate courses and contributed to curriculum design, mentorship, and graduate leadership initiatives. His research and teaching are complemented by active participation in the LGBTQ+ Institute and community engagement projects in bilingual environmental education and public health translation.
Cornel Grey
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Cornel Grey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western University. His scholarship centers Black queer life and the politics of intimacy, embodiment, and care. Working across Black Studies, Queer Health, Critical Public Health, and Black Diaspora Studies, Cornel examines how Black queer men navigate desire, touch, and risk in ways that challenge dominant frameworks in medicine, public health, and sexuality studies. His research draws on qualitative and archival approaches to illuminate the affective and structural forces that shape Black queer experiences, with particular attention to the significance of pleasure, vulnerability, and relationality in everyday life.
Cornel’s current research program is currently anchored by two major projects. The first is a qualitative study exploring Black queer men’s experiences of and desires for positive touch, focusing on how touch functions as a site of both affirmation and political critique. The second is an archival project tracing the transnational movements of Black queer diasporic artists and writers, mapping how their creative and intellectual work reshaped cultural and political understandings of Black queer life across borders. Together, these projects deepen conversations about care, embodiment, and the intimate practices through which Black queer communities imagine and enact survivability.
Daphnie Sicre
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Dr. Daphnie Sicre is a multi-hyphenated theatre artist—a director, dramaturg, scholar, and educator—who is deeply committed to Black and Latinx perspectives in theatre, especially AfroLatinidad. Engaging in anti-racist and culturally competent practices, she helps bring stories from the page to the stage. Since moving to Los Angeles, she has expanded her directing and dramaturgy portfolio while also delivering multiple keynote addresses across the country. She also co-directs the Candela Fellowship for Latine and Caribbean Musical Theatre Playwrights with the Dramatists Guild in New York, NY, while teaching theatre full-time at UC Riverside. Currently, she is preparing to publish the first companion on Latine and Caribbean Musical Theatre. Her latest publication was a book chapter, “Archiving AfroLatine Theatre” appear in Dramaturgy and History: Staging the Archive. Other works include, an article in Theatre Symposium: Race & Theatre (“Being Black and Latinx in Theatre Today”) and the co-published piece “Training Theatre Students of Colour in the United States” in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. She has also contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Latinx Theatre and Performance; Contemporary Black Theatre & Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, & Solidarity; Stages of Reckoning: Anti-Racist and Decolonial Actor Training; The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance; Black Acting Methods; Shakespeare & Latinidad; and the upcoming Decolonizing Dramaturgy in Global Contexts and the AfroLatin@ Reader Vol. 2. She recently returned to HowlRound as a writer, where she led a series featuring AfroLatine playwrights for eight weeks and co-facilitated a series on theatre equity practices.
When she is not writing, directing, or doing dramaturgy, she works as a cultural consultant for Nickelodeon, contributing to the Emmy-nominated Santiago of the Seas, The Face, and the film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Recently, she was invited to lead workshops with Walt Disney Imagineering on The Hidden Stories of AfroLatinidad. Through her artistry, scholarship, and advocacy, Sicre amplifies marginalized voices and reimagines the possibilities of theatre for the future. Standing at the intersection of creativity, equity, and pedagogy, she remains committed to dismantling barriers, fostering representation, and transforming both the stage and the classroom into more inclusive spaces for generations to come. https://daphniesicre.com/ Follow on IG: @drsicrelovestheatre
Ashley Coleman Taylor
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Ashley Coleman Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A Black queer femme of circum-Caribbean and U.S. southern descent, she was born, raised, and educated in the city of Atlanta, GA. She earned her B.A. degrees from Spelman College in both Religious Studies and Psychology, her Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and her Ph.D.in Person, Community, and Religious Practices from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion.
As a Black feminist Africana religionist and gender studies scholar, she employs qualitative approaches to study and write about the corporeal complexities of Black women in Puerto Rico and LGBT elders in Atlanta, Georgia. Locating the religious in the mundane, her work tends to the materiality of the body and land/space/place and highlights the relationships between the intricacies of experience and embodiment as African diasporic subjects. Dr. Coleman Taylor’s first ethnographic manuscript, Majestad Negra: Race, Gender and Religious Experience in Puerto Rico, interrogates how early modern religious constructions of embodied “Otherness” inform contemporary ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality in the archipelago. It examines the ways Afro-Puerto Rican women, as Black subjects, employ resistive corporeal strategies to self-define their reality and construct counternarratives of being. The manuscript was a finalist for the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize, a dissertation-to-book award.
Dr. Coleman Taylor’s research has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of University Women, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+), the James Weldon Johnson Institute, and the Arcus Foundation. Her work has been published in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, PMLA, and the Africana Studies Review.
Shu Wan
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Shu Wan is currently marticulated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. He is passionated about the pedagogical use of AI in humanities education.
Undergraduate Research Fellows
Michelle Ametekpor
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Michelle Ametekpor is a junior at Williams College, where they study Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a concentration in Public Health. They have They are interested in studying archival methods and practice, queer of color critique, digital humanities, and Black critical theory. Currently, their project at the BBQ+ is on creating a queer exhibit highlighting queer and Black life in spaces where it has been historically ignored or deliberately excluded. The exhibit "Archive Of Our Own: Finding Blackness with the Queer Archives", contends with Black narratives on campus becoming fragmented in order to tell more dominant narratives within the university archives. The exhibits holds celebration, loss, and fragments and creates a narrative about Black queer existence using the frameworks of critical fabulation.
Sonal Churiwal
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Sonal Churiwal is an fourth-year undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, studying Political Science and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Creative Writing. Sonal's research interests lie at the intersection of South Asian Studies, Gender Studies, and decolonial thought. As a Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellow, Sonal is researching how caste and religion shape media coverage of sexual violence in India. Recently, Sonal was the recipient of the Andrea Biggs Undergraduate Research Award, through which she continued her research, analyzing how caste and religion shape disparate campaigns against sexual violence in various territories controlled by the Indian State. Inspired by her campus organizing experiences, Sonal is also pursuing independent research interrogating Asian Americans' motivations of student activism, in particular, how assimilationist motivations shape pro-institution activism. Outside of research, Sonal is also involved on Asian American community advocacy, focusing on building interracial solidarity, immigrant justice, and mutual aid. As an aspiring movement lawyer and public scholar, Sonal is interested in community-centered, theory-driven praxis in service of grassroots organizing, building networks of care, and propelling political education.
Jessica Wang
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Jessica Wang is a senior at Harvard College studying English with a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights. She is a researcher with Take Back Harvard, the first digital archive documenting and contextualizing Harvard's history of sexual violence and discrimination. She has also conducted archival research on reproductive history in Massachusetts as a Carol K. Pforzheimer Student Fellow and Yun Family Research Fellow for Revolutionary Thinking under Harvard College. She has previously interned at American Ancestors and Greater Boston Legal Services. She is interested in archival theory, public history, and Asian American Literature.
Reneé Yankah
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Reneé "Ren" Yankah is a second-year student studying Public Health and Human Services & Social Justice with a minor in Sustainability and a micro-minor in Health Equity. Ren's main focus within the Critical Pedagogy Lab is critically analyzing the reimagination of health and human services frameworks by centering non-Western knowledge systems, decolonial pedagogy, and determining the ethos of AI within the 21st century.