Full Biography
Tabatha L. Jones Jolivet, PhD
Tabatha L. Jones Jolivet, PhD, (she/her) is an abolitionist organizer, educator, minister and community-engaged, interdisciplinary scholar whose praxis of 鈥渓ove, study and struggle鈥 is rooted in Black radical tradition and prophetic spirituality.
She holds a doctoral degree in education from Claremont Graduate University and is an associate professor in the School of Behavioral and Applied Sciences at Azusa Pacific University, where she teaches doctoral-level courses on equity and social justice, leading change and research inquiry.
Jones Jolivet specializes in the intersectional study of cultures and systems of domination; abolitionist and liberatory pedagogies; sacred resistance and social movements; and building life-affirming institutions and societies. She is a student and practitioner of womanist worldmaking, Black women鈥檚 grassroots organizing and Black freedom struggle.
As a collectivist, she strives to upend oppressive ideologies, systems and social institutions while nurturing liberatory and life-affirming conditions for flourishing. She is the founder and convener of the Womanist and Black Feminist Abolition Collective, a research consortium that incubates creative intellectual projects that cultivate womanist, Black feminist and abolitionist ideas, dreams, visions, theories and praxis.
Jones Jolivet is a regular media guest, speaker, consultant and a trainer in a variety of local, national and international contexts such as community meetings and forums, grassroots organizations, civic and faith communities, colleges and universities, academic conferences, public meetings and policy environments.
As a public intellectual, she co-leads several community-based, critical participatory action research projects while practicing sustained, nonviolent direct action and protest as an organizer with Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, Black Lives Matter Grassroots, Clergy 4 Black Lives and the People鈥檚 Budget Los Angeles Coalition.
A founding board member of Abolitionist Sanctuary, an organization devoted to training civic and faith leaders in the work of abolition, she serves as an advisory board member and is the co-author of 鈥淲hite Jesus: The Architecture of Racism in Religion and Education鈥 (Peter Lang, 2018).