Stephanie Jones is a Doctoral Candidate in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program at Syracuse University. She has a certificate of advanced study in Women and Gender Studies. She has served as the Assistant Director of TA Education for the Syracuse University Writing Program. She is currently a Syracuse University Humanities Dissertation Fellow. She was awarded the 2021 Geneva Smitherman Award for Research in Black Language, Literacies, Cultures, and Rhetorics from NCTE/CCCC Black Caucus and the 2021 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for Writing Rhetoric and Composition Studies. Her latest publication, “I Heard That: The Sociolinguist Reality of the Black Feminist Afrofuture,” examines the “sociolinguistically constructed” meaning of Afrofuturism. Her research interests include Afrofuturist Feminisms, Black Feminist Rhetorical Studies, and Digital Humanities.

Her dissertation, “Afrofuturist Feminism as Theory & Praxis: Rhetorical Root Working in the Black Speculative Arts Movement,” examines the history of Afrofuturism as it relates to the contributions of Black women to the Black speculative arts movement. An Afrofuturist feminist approach to rhetorical analysis then gives us rhetorical root working; a method of analysis that imagines the recovery of ancestral roots through the emergence of rootedness as a teaching practice that heals in the past, present, and future.