Terrance Wooten Lester D. Coltrane III Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

My interdisciplinary research focuses on intersectional approaches to examining structural inequality. I do this through a number of varied sites: homelessness, the law, and institutions of higher education. I root my research in Black queer and feminist scholarship and activism to offer alternative ways of addressing structural inequality as well as make legible various gaps in pre-existing models for addressing structural inequality. As a humanist social scientist, I do this work through qualitative methodologies such as interviews, participant observations, close readings, archival research, and discourse analysis.

I am currently working on my first book manuscript, Registered: Homelessness, Sex Offense, and Carceral Sexuality (under contract, University of California Press), which examines how those who “register” as sex offenders and homeless in the DC metropolitan area are regulated and managed through racialized modes of social control. My secondary project considers the social construction of vulnerability and its role in determining housing outcomes for those experiencing homelessness.

I have published articles in differences, Feminist Formations, The Black Scholar, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, American Psychologist, and Kalfou.

My teaching primarily focuses on Black genders and sexualities (particularly framed through Black feminist and queer theories), poverty and inequality, and Black geographies/ecologies; though, I am very intellectually curious, which gets reflected in a lot of my course content.