Dr. Sharon L. Bethea, founding member

My research is grounded in an Africa-centered, community-centered epistemology, drawing on the tenets of African/Black Psychology, and storytelling methodologies. I utilize an African-centered genocide framework that overstands that the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic trafficking and terrorizing of African peoples, colonialism/neo-colonialism, and contemporary structural and state violence is a continuum of genocide across the African continent and its diaspora. Unlike most Eurocentric paradigms that collapse African genocide into generic models, my work refutes such conflation because Eurocentric models obscure distinct historical contexts, perpetuate invisibility, and undermine global accountability. I argue that genocide in African contexts is not only the destruction of bodies; it is also an assault on collective memory, language, spirituality, land, resources, and knowledge systems, disrupting intergenerational transmission of identity, history, and belonging. 
 

I have had the honor of traveling, and researching with students, colleagues and friends to communities across Africa and the African Diaspora, witnessing firsthand the resistance, beauty, brilliance and genius of African people. What absolute joy!! 
GHRAD's mission is specifically framed around genocide in Africa and the Black/African Diaspora and attempts to utilize African concepts and ways of being to disrupt mass atrocities. GHRAD utilizes an Ubuntu grounded praxis whereas community engagement and testimonies are central to the work. The team is interdisciplinary and is co-founded and run by a scholar who has lived experiences and direct contact with the community. And the yearly conference is so special with amazing keynotes and presenters with lived experiences from all over Africa and  the African Diaspora.

And what makes it really special are the amazing African people that I hold in high esteem and  respect and have loved working  with in Burundi. 
 

Giving honor to the Creator and Deities, standing on the shoulders of my Ancestors and Elders, my journey is grounded in Spirit, nurtured by a Family that instilled enduring values of spirituality, and sustained by a community that safeguarded and shaped my commitments. 
I entered this work through a lifelong commitment to African/Black people and my place and duty to the continued work of our liberation. As an educator, I am called, spiritually and professionally, to Jegna students through community engaged scholarship, immersing them in dialogue with, and the lived experiences of, communities across Black America, the African continent, and the broader African/Black Diaspora. Given GHRAD’s composition and its praxis of ubuntu and community engagement, it provides a fitting and generative home for this work.