Alissa Irvin is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is a community-engaged scholar whose lived experiences foreground her integration of Black feminist and womanist approaches to justice work in education. Informed by her mothering and experiences as a substitute teacher and community educator Alissa is a critically conscious qualitative researcher with extensive expertise in curriculum evaluation and assessment, teacher education and student advising. With a demonstrated proficiency in various learning management systems, data analysis, and scholarly writing, Alissa is adept in community engagement and programming, classroom management and strategic planning. Alissa will be earning her Ph.D. in Education: Curriculum, Instruction. Her work centers historical practices of Black women educators, Black girlhood, and intergenerational literacies. Alissa’s research involves three distinct areas of interest including (a) historical legacy, interiority, and memory work, (b) critical discourse and narrative analysis, Black storytelling and the literary arts as methodology, and (c) action-based research with moving theory to practice for transformative outcomes such as mothering and other-mothering Black girls into safe space making in school and education. Having taught undergraduate courses in multicultural literature, social justice and education, Black arts and aesthetic across the diaspora, Alissa embeds pedagogical approaches that evoke critical thinking, including contemporary media analysis, reflexivity and creativity to engage pre-service teachers in liberatory praxis.