Tabatha Jones Jolivet, Ph.D.

Tabatha L. Jones Jolivet, Ph.D. (she/her) is an abolitionist organizer, educator, minister, and community-engaged scholar whose praxis of “love, study, and struggle” is rooted in Black radical tradition and prophetic spirituality. She is a student and practitioner of Womanist worldmaking, Black women’s 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 holds a PhD in Education from Claremont Graduate University, a member of the Claremont Colleges, in Claremont, California. Currently, she 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, spirituality of leadership, research inquiry, and qualitative research methodologies. She specializes in the intersectional study of cultures and systems of domination; equity and social justice; abolitionist and liberatory pedagogies; sacred resistance and social movements; and building life-affirming institutions and societies. She is the founder and convener of the Womanist & 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. She brings 30 years of extensive leadership experience ranging from grassroots community organizing to senior-level university leadership. 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’s 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 presently serves as an advisory board member. She is the co-author of White Jesus: The Architecture of Racism in Religion and Education (Peter Lang, 2018) and a regular media guest, speaker, consultant, and trainer in a variety of local, national, and international contexts, such as community meetings and forums, grassroots organizations, civic and spiritual organizations, colleges and universities, schools, academic conferences, nonprofit organizations, public meetings, rallies, protests, and policy environments.