Sadiyah Malcolm began working at the Center for Social Solutions in the summer of 2023 as a Rackham Doctoral intern. As a new member of the staff, Sadiyah has enjoyed working closely with the community fellows to attend to community needs and visions. Most recently, she has been finding research focused on Flint according to the social determinants of health. She notes, “reparations is a matter of human rights; our community fellows are doing amazing work, and I’m proud to be a part of this transformative work.”


As a doctoral intern, Sadiyah has been working on the Crafting Democratic Futures (CDF) project. CDF creates and leverages a national network of college and university-based humanities scholars, working in partnerships with community-based organizations, to develop research-informed reparation plans for each location.


Before working with the Center for Social Solutions, Sadiyah conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Jamaica, as an affiliate with the Centre for Reparation Research (CRR) at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Her primary teaching and research interests are in Black girlhoods, critical ethnography, decolonial approaches to social research, gender and sexuality, qualitative methods, sociology, and Black studies/Black study. In her dissertation research, she uses critical ethnography, among other qualitative methods to witness the lifeworlds of girls coming of age in Kingston, along the backdrop of Jamaica's contested sociopolitical histories and contemporary social violence. More broadly, her dissertation situates the capital city of Kingston, Jamaica amidst discourse on race, sexuality, agency, and age, specifically discussing the racist colonial legacies of morality, reproductive coercion, social control, and performance, and how these matters circumscribe the lives of her interlocutors. 

Learn more about Crafting Democratic Futures on the project website.