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ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT


Candice Merritt

Candice Merritt

Degree and Year

Women’s Studies, B.A. 2009

Professional Title

Ph.D. student in African American Studies

Employer

Northwestern University

Professional Background

After graduating in 2009, I worked in AmeriCorps in Atlanta, GA assisting local agencies who serviced homeless youth through housing and continuing education programs and also partnered with Fulton County juvenile justice initiatives that focused upon teenage survivors and at-risk youth of commercial sexual exploitation and human trafficking. After completing my term, I spent the bulk of my professional career working in higher education at Georgia State University as an admissions representative and processor and later as an academic advisor for undergraduate and graduate students. After almost a decade of professional, salaried work, I am a student again. I confess, what began in my introductory Women’s Studies course at Emory University never left me. I greatly missed my intellectual pursuits around questions of difference, power, and theory. I am now pursuing my doctoral degree in African American Studies with a focus on gender and sexuality.

How has being a WGSS graduate from Emory shaped your life and career?

Pursuing my undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies (before name change) provided me a kind of solace and place to reckon with the most difficult histories and issues facing the world today by first ripping the cloak from my mind. I not only learned about how inequalities in gender, race, class, and sexuality shaped my everyday life and the broader political context I inhabited, I also developed the permission and acuity to ask critical questions and to value deep self-reflection as a participant in the world. The compassion I began to develop in and outside the classroom and skill sets in studying social phenomena has since helped me navigate my various employment environments which have demanded of me competencies in working across differences and big picture understandings of people, place, and politics.