[J]oycelyn A. Wilson, aka Dr. Joyce, is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Qualitative Methodologies in the Department of Learning Sciences and Technologies at Virginia Tech’s School of Education. She is also affiliate faculty in the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), an Emmy-nominated documentary film producer, and the founding director of the Four Four Beat Project, a digital pedagogies archive influenced by Hip Hop and popular culture.
Professor Wilson is a Hip Hop generation scholar of social and cultural foundations of education and ethnographic methodologies. Her interests are in African American culture and intellectual history, race and gender in popular culture, autoethnography, and culturally-relevant pedagogies that help develop STEM and social justice capacities of youth and youth influencers.
Her current research fuses autoethnography with Black women intellectual history and Hip Hop Based Education (HipHopEd). She is currently under book contract with Peter Lang Publishing.
Dr. Wilson is a Hiphop Archive alumnus fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, part of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She writes for TheHipHopSnob.com and is a partner in the HipHopEd collective. She has contributed commentary to The Root, AJC.com, BET, and VH1 Rock Docs’s ATL: The Untold Story of Atlanta’s Rise in the Rap Game.
Along with civil rights leader Andrew Young, she co-produced the Emmy-winning documentary film Walking With Guns, featuring rapper/actor Clifford “TI” Harris, Jr. and Grammy-winning rapper Michael Render. Before parlaying her hip hop sensibilities into academia, Dr. Wilson was a high school math teacher and journalist for market-leading publications such as XXL, The Source, Fader, Rap Pages, and wax poetics.
