Sedrick Miles, Monroe Fellow, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South

Sedrick Miles

Monroe Fellowship 2017

Biography

Sedrick Miles is a Ph.D. candidate at the Roger Thayer Stone Center For Latin American Studies. Both within and outside academia, his work has explored the relationships between cultural identity, race, and social development.

Before joining the Stone Center, Sedrick has spent 15 years designing and conducting action-oriented youth policy training and programming for community based organizations. This included brokering relationships with between national and grassroots organizations collaborating in the areas of K-12 education, Higher Ed, civic education, leadership development, and juvenile justice reform.

Sedrick’s Ph.D. interests focus on the intersections between language, cultural identity, and transnationalism, taking a detailed look at the contemporary identities of Blacks in the diaspora and, in particular, the language interactions of Black American and Black Brazilian traveling communities.

Research

This project is a mini historiography on domestic labor in the New Orleans region. The research will build on existing southern focused ethnographic narratives and connect to larger scale dissertation work on intergenerational economic, educational, and professional changes in working class and working poor communities in the black diaspora. The goal of the project is to contribute to the literature on domestic work by examining the subjective aspects of the lives of former and current domestic workers and how their experiences have evolved over time, particularly from the perspective of generational educational opportunities.