About
AunRika Tucker-Shabazz is a performer, historical sociologist and first-generation doctoral candidate from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She uses critical theories of power, history, and social change to enrich community wellbeing and empower youth. Her scholarship explores rearrangements of gender, religion, and human sexuality across time and space. Under Fatma Müge Göçek, her dissertation advisor, her dissertation research explores the history of religious and scientific conventions of knowledge production about incest in Western modernity. She uses theater, art therapy, film, and comics to develop community-engaged interventions that enrich incest survivors. She has forthcoming publications on racial capitalism and genocide (Social Science History 2023), Muslim identity in Metro Detroit (International Journal of Comparative Sociology 2023), exclusion of indigenous and Black knowledge and experience of collective violence (Oxford Handbook of Comparative Historical Sociology 2023), the rigor of reproductive justice frameworks to operationalize human rights discourse when theorizing indigenous and Black men as victims of rape, genocide, and incest (Humanity and Society 2023), and images of slavery, racism and autocracy in The Woman King (2022) (CLR James Journal 2024).
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Williams College and masters from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Her ethics are shaped by indigenous methodologies, liberation theology, Black feminist thought, and critical dis/ability studies. AunRika worked closely with Black lesbian scholar-activist, filmmaker (NO! The Rape documentary 2004), incest survivor and advocate Aishah S. Simmons on her TheFeministWire launch of Love with Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse ( AK Press 2019), an interdisciplinary anthology of survivors testimonies about incest and child sexual abuse in diasporic communities. She is a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, an alumnus of Heroic Public Speaking (2022), a Rackham Graduate Fellow (2017 – 21), a Graduate Academic Liaison for the Ginsberg Center of Community Engagement and Learning (’21-'23), and a Martin Luther King TedTalk competition winner (Michigan 2019). Since 2020, she has worked under Laura De Becker at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as a curatorial intern on the James and Vivian Curtis Collection. Using oral histories to intervene in art history, she uses primary and secondary objects to reconstruct the multiple configurations of art, propoganda, and Blackness among 20th century artists and collectors.
Currently, she is preparing for the job market.
Before joining the Ann Arbor community, she worked as a middle school English teacher and strategic development officer for nonprofit education Breakthrough Twin Cities, Minnesota. While interning at the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office of Strategic Initiatives and Community Relations, AunRika worked with community partners across school districts to reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system.
