About this speaker
Dr. Chelsea Johnson is a sociologist, writer, and staff user experience researcher for Trust at LinkedIn. Her academic research focuses on bodies as mediums of culture, or the physical and symbolic form through which race, class, and gender hierarchies, social control, and social etiquette are played out. Dr. Johnson's work on Black women and hair has been published in CRWN Magazine, NaturallyCurly, Sociology of Sport Journal, Teen Vogue, and Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Hair series. Her book Natural: Black Beauty and the Politics of Hair on the global natural hair movement will be released by NYU Press in October 2024.
Dr. Johnson is also co-founder of CLC Collective, a public sociology organization, whose children's books about Black feminism and intersectionality have been featured by Google Talks, Lisa Ling, The New York Times WireCutter, Katie Couric, The Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and more.
She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology with a graduate certificate in Gender Studies from USC in 2019. She is also an alumna of Spelman College, the Black European Summer School, the International Decolonial Black Feminism School, a UNCF/Mellon-Mays Fellow, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and has spent a year as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.
