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Thais Council, Ph.D.

Biography:

Dr. Thais Council joined the University of Kentucky as an Assistant Professor of Literacy in the College of Education and a Faculty Affiliate of African American and Africana Studies in 2021 after nearly two decades as a reading specialist, literacy advocate, and teacher educator. Her scholarship focuses on how literacy policy and Black-led community-based practices can repair structural inequities and harm imposed upon historically marginalized urban schools and disenfranchised communities. She employs the Black Intellectual Tradition as a theoretical lens to privilege the lives and wisdom of Black people and participatory research methods as a methodological alternative to academic research conducted through a hegemonic gaze.

Research Interests:
Black Education
Black Reparatory Literacies
Community-Engaged/Participatory Action Research
Black Intellectual Tradition
Selected Publications:

Council, T., Earls, S., Graham, R., & George, S. (2021). Teachers at the Center: Place and Displacement in Southwest Atlanta. The Assembly: A Journal of Public Scholarship on Education, 3, 35-51.

King, J. E., Council, T., Fournillier, J., Richardson, V., Akua, C., McClendon, N., Neely, A., Chisolm, G. M., Simpkins-Russell, T., Vieira da Silva Santos, F., & Streeter, M. (2019). Pedagogy for partisanship: research training for Black graduate students. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(2), 188-209. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2018.1548040

Gordon, C. T., Council, T., Dukes, N. & Muhammad, G. E. (2019). Defying the single narrative of Black girls’ literacies: Reflections on an African American read-in. Multicultural Perspectives, 21(1), 3- 10. https://doi.org/10.1080/15210960.2019.1572484