Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom wants to meet people where they are through her work, which uses many platforms and crosses multiple disciplines. But her strategy is simple.; She starts with culture.
“Culture is where we try to understand a truly complex world in our own small local context,” says McMillan Cottom. “Fundamentally, I want my scholarship to matter in people’s lives and make it so. It would be really helpful if we didn’t lose sight of how people live.”
McMillan Cottom is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill and a senior senior fellow at the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. She is also a columnist. new york times, He is an award-winning author and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.
McMillan Cottom received his Ph.D. In 2015, she earned her PhD in Sociology from Laney Graduate School of Emory University and her BA in English and Political Science from North Carolina Central University.
She says the things that impressed her in graduate school were theoretically sophisticated and important to people.
“Du Bois is Du Bois for a reason,” she says. “He is a truly great methodologist and a very sophisticated theorist. But love him or hate him, Du Bois absolutely understood that his work had to be in dialogue with other people.”
When McMillan Cottom entered graduate school, she had more questions than disciplinary allegiances, which led her to the intersection of the sociology of education and political economy. At this intersection, McMillan Cottom emphasizes the importance of storytelling in reaching people and has maintained this technique closely throughout her work.
“[Du Bois] I wrote for the public, gave public lectures, wrote creative works, and even wrote novels,” she says. “He understood that you need both truth and storytelling to make people understand that another world is possible, and that you can’t leave storytelling alone because, frankly, storytelling eats truth for lunch.”
McMillan Cottom's thesis research at Emory explored for-profit colleges, which led to her first book, Lower Ed: The troubling growth of for-profit colleges in the new economy; It was published in 2017 and catapulted her onto the national stage.
“I was really struggling to hold on to two things at the same time: civil rights and suffrage, and Black Americans’ deep belief in education as their ticket to mobility,” she says. “And then there’s the fact that a lot of education doesn’t produce good results for all of us. Like, how can you respect that both of those things are true?”
Sociology helped McMillan Cottom wrestle with her questions, but she intentionally approached them through a black feminist lens.
“I strongly believe that if you start asking questions about where black women’s experiences are, you’ll have a clear path to answering really great, complex questions about the rest of the world that everyone else can see,” she says. .
McMillan Cottom's second book; THICK: And other essays, Published in 2019. The book features a collection of essays on topics ranging from black femininity to McMillan Cottom's experiences at the academy. An Amazon bestseller has won the Brooklyn Public Library's 2019 Literary Award.
In 2023, McMillan Cottom received the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Award from Brandeis University for outstanding and sustained scholarly contributions to race, ethnicity, and/or religious relations. In the same year, she was selected as one of the top 200 educators in the country. education week “2023 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings,” an annual list published by the American Enterprise Institute’s Director of Education Policy Studies; education week Blogger Frederick M. Hess. This list recognizes scholars who have moved ideas from academic journals into national conversations.
Scholars trained in sociology now ask questions such as “Where is the power?” and “Where is the money associated with status and mobility?” She is particularly interested in digital sociology, considering how access to technology has affected access to quality education.
“At a very low cost, most people, especially those in the West, can use technology to access the entire world at the same time,” says McMillan Cottom. “It doesn’t necessarily benefit minorities, it doesn’t mean we have more economic mobility and better access to high-quality education. You know, the digital part really complicates the issues of quality and accessibility.”
McMillan Cottom also challenges students to ask important questions. She is co-teaching an interdisciplinary graduate course titled “Politics, Power, and Platforms” with Dr. Daniel Kriess at UNC Chapel Hill. In this course, they ask students to consider big questions such as “Who influences culture and politics, and why?”
In the next phase of his career, McMillan Cottom is learning the difference between what he can do and what he can't do.
“I dream of focusing more and more of my energy on projects that only I can do,” she says. “There are some questions, some types of work that utilize all my experience and all my skills, and that’s what really excites me.”
As always, McMillan Cottom hopes students and the public will join us on this journey.