shea wesley martin

shea wesley martin (he/they) is a Black trans/disciplinary educator, critical theorist, and qualitative methodologist committed to community-engaged scholarship that centers the voices, sensemaking, and dreams of youth. In their work, shea employs critical ethnographic methods to explore the intersections of place, identity, literacy, and archiving through lenses of Black geographies, queer/trans studies, and abolitionist thought. An audacious project of (re)memory and freedom-dreaming, their current project explores the [im]possibilities within schooling and Blackness by tracing the intertwined relationships between Black queer and trans youth’s agentive literacy practices, identities, sociohistorical context, and place in the Deep South. 
 
shea earned their Ph.D. in Teaching and Learning from The Ohio State University, specializing in Adolescent, Postsecondary, and Community Literacies, along with a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A proud product of Alexandria City Public Schools, they also hold an M.Ed. in Education Leadership and Policy from Boston University, a B.A. in English and African American Studies from George Mason University, and an A.A. in Liberal Arts from Northern Virginia Community College.
 
shea’s scholarly orientation is informed by a decade-long career in education – working as a classroom teacher, university instructor, instructional coach, facilitator, and systems-level consultant in/with schools, districts and organizations in the United States and abroad. A publicly-engaged scholar and community organizer, they have served as co-founder/facilitator of several literacy initiatives aimed at supporting LGBTQIA+ youth through increased access to young adult literature, affirming pedagogies, and more LGBTQ-inclusive curricula. 
 
shea’s work is featured in The Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, English Journal, Radical Teacher and Autostraddle as well as in the anthologies, Hip Hop Studies and Queer Black Feminism and Advancing Qualitative Inquiry Toward Methodological Inclusion.