Brains Beyond Bodies

As a visiting fellow in the Affect and Cognition Lab in the College of Human Ecology, Keshia Harris is designing an intervention that evaluates the impact of the Get to Know Your Brain Days program on participating high school and elementary school students from underrepresented backgrounds. For the 2021-22 academic year, the Brain Days program is expanding to Syracuse Public Schools, and Harris’s project, Brains Beyond Bodies, will investigate how identity processes and mentoring relationships contribute to school connectedness, sense of purpose, and postsecondary goals. In addition, Harris’s previous research examined adolescent perceptions of socioeconomic mobility in relation to skin color and race in Salvador, Brazil and Cartagena, Colombia through a mixed methods study.

As a Faculty Fellow in Engaged Scholarship, Harris is working on three primary goals: 1) publishing peer reviewed articles illustrating findings from her research in Brazil and Colombia, 2) translating the articles to Spanish and Portuguese, and 3) creating public facing materials, such as a newsletter or virtual exhibit, about the Brains Beyond Bodies project.

“My life mission is to give back to the communities that have contributed to who I am today. Typically, when I share this statement the assumption is that I am referring to the community in which I was raised. For clarification, I am referring to the community of my ancestry as an African American woman residing on colonized land. I am referring to the community of the African Diaspora, descendants of African enslaved people who now reside in the Americas, more specifically in the U.S. and Latin America.” —Keshia Harris