Alene Moris Women’s Center

Ralina L. Joseph, PhD

Women of Courage

Dr. Ralina L. Joseph is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington (UW). Dr. Joseph is the founding director of the University of Washington’s Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE), and began and facilitates GO-MAP’s dissertation writing group. Additionally, she created the Communication Department’s Communication and Difference Course arc, and co-founded WIRED (Women Investigating Race, Ethnicity, and Difference), a group for UW tenure-track faculty working in the areas of difference.

Dr. Joseph is an expert in the mediated communication of difference, or, more specifically, contemporary representations of race, gender, and sexuality in the media. Her first book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2013), critiques anti-Black racism in mixed- race Black representations in the decade leading up to Obama’s 2008 election. Dr. Joseph is currently completing her second book project, Screening Strategic Ambiguity: Reading Black Female Resistance to the Post-racial Lie (forthcoming, New York University Press), an examination of Black women’s negotiation of racism and sexism in the Michelle Obama era.

Dr. Joseph is on the editorial board of three journals, chairs the Critical Ethnic Studies Committee of the American Studies Association, and has received awards and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Woodrow Wilson/Mellon, the University of California, the American Association of University Women, UW’s Graduate Opportunity and Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP) and UW’s Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. Dr. Joseph received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in American Civilization from Brown University, Masters and Doctorate Degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and joined the UW in 2005.