Associate Director for Research, Public Education

Día Joy Wright, PhD

Profile Type:

Associate Director for Research
Public Education

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  2. Día Joy Wright, PhD

Interdisciplinary and community-centered advocate who facilitates transformative justice and collective liberation through anti-oppressive, innovative, and collaborative research and methodologies.

Biography

Dr. Día Joy Wright is an interdisciplinary BlackQueer Feminist scholar, poet, and sociocultural and educational anthropologist writing about, experiencing, researching, and exploring transformative racial justice, educational equity, and liberative social embodiment and practice. Their work is dedicated to exploring educational liberation practices for underrepresented and underserved QT+BIPOC populations through addressing the many ways structures of oppressions map onto the everyday lives and bodies of those communities through interdisciplinary, culturally specific, creative, and socially reflective educational methodologies, policies, and practices. Dr. Joy believes that liberation is collective, and as such we must “get free” by radically freedom-dreaming, radically reimagining, radically loving, and radically enacting justice with those at the margins of society.

Dr. Joy also has extensive training and applied research experience in sociocultural and educational anthropology with respect to anti-oppressive, innovative, transformative, and inclusive pedagogical practices in theory, fieldwork, ethnography, and alternative qualitative methodologies as they affect marginalized communities, as well as applied expertise in the direct training, coaching, and professional/pedagogical development of other educators in policies, practices, and theories of racial justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, antiracism, and anti-oppression. They also hold substantial teaching experience in PreK-12, undergraduate, graduate, and professional (faculty/staff/Continuing education/K-12 Teacher) student populations through the frameworks of anti-oppression, educational equity, Ignatian spirituality, and the values of Jesuit education.

Prior to joining Seattle University, Dr. Joy was the inaugural Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies Specialist in Research & Professional Development with the Faculty Center for Ignatian Pedagogy at Loyola University Chicago.

Education

  • PhD, Sociocultural Anthropology, American University
  • MA, Public Anthropology, American University
  • MA, Theatre and Performance Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
  • BA, Anthropology and Theatre, Transylvania University

Courses Taught

Dr. Wright has taught at every level of education (Pre-K, K-12, Undergraduate & Graduate, Adult Education & Development) in a range of courses in racial history, racial justice, inequality, identity reconstruction, civic action, physical theatre, embodied ethnography, Black & BlackQueer Identity, community engagement, and equitable education, among many other workshops and trainings. Their teaching philosophy is grounded in the notion of collective liberation and practice of beloved community.

They believe wholeheartedly, as bell hooks establishes in teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, that “to build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.” In so doing, their practice is grounded in anti-oppressive pedagogies and inclusive teaching strategies that calls educators to organize our efforts in the direction of institutional and social change; requiring us to commit to continuous critical self-reflection, lifetime learning, and progressive betterment.

Publications

  • Wright, Día Joy (2026) “Power, History, & the Politics of Life,” Section Introduction, Poems Were Strangers: An Anthology of Ethnographic and Anthropological Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2026).
  • Colacchio, Bridget M.; Mansbach, Jessica; Wright, Día Joy. “Introducing The Loyola Way: An Ignatian Pedagogy framework enlivened by anti-oppressive and student-centered approaches,” Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal, 2025.