Joycelyn Wilson is an integrative curriculum designer, cultural studies educator, and faculty of Hip Hop Studies and Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is the founder of the HipHop2020 Innovation Archive, an ed-tech start-up inspired by hip hop culture's intersections with the art of teaching and learning.
Dr. Wilson started her career as a high school Algebra teacher who also freelanced as a music journalist. Her work, currently, sits at the intersection of education and cultural politics, with an emphasis on the critical design natures of Black music, performance, and maker culture - as impacted by Hip Hop in the American South. As recently highlighted in Amazon Future Engineer’s "Your Voice Is Power", Dr. Wilson leverages the connections between hip hop's techno-pedagogical affordances and relationships to design thinking in computational and creative media-making. Through YVIP, high school students gain a learning experience and participate in a coding competition that uses hip hop as a design remix to explore how computer science, music, and entrepreneurship can help students learn to code and advance racial equity. The project is a collaboration with EarSketch, Pharrell Williams's YELLOW, and Georgia Tech's Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC).
Dr. Wilson's scholarship has implications across curriculum design, social justice and STEAM, methodologies of humanistic inquiry, and the archival preservation of Hip Hop integrative curriculum design. It is published across academic and popular platforms including Teachers College Press, University of Georgia Press, International Journal of Africana Studies, Routledge, as well as The Bitter Southerner, Billboard, InStyle, The Root, and Google Arts & Culture. She is also the co-producer of the Emmy-nominated docufilm “Walking With Guns, produced in collaboration with UN Ambassador and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young.
She has contributed commentary to MSBNC, Netflix's Hip Hop Evolution, VH1's ATL Rise, and TV-One's UnSung. She has spoken at universities and colleges including Harvard University, Occidental College, Morehouse College, and Emory University's Center for Digital Scholarship. Beyond pop culture, Atlanta hip-hop and hip-hop’s intersection with politics and culture, Dr. Wilson can discuss the cultural histories of civil rights and social justice in the South, Black maker, media, and technology. She is available to broadly discuss topics related to digital archiving and preservation, VR, interactive narrative, and experimental digital art.
Dr. Wilson received her BS in Mathematics and PhD in the Social Foundations of Education from the University of Georgia, and her MA in Curriculum and Instruction from the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University. She continues to serve her community in various ways, and is an appointed member by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms to the City of Atlanta's Police Use of Force Advisory Council. Outside of work, she enjoys time with family and friends, listening to music, traveling, and talking about fashion.
