Patricia (Pat) Parker

Patricia (Pat) Parker is a communication professor and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a participatory researcher committed to helping to make the Beloved Community a reality. In 2007, along with her students, and girls and women in a local public housing neighborhood, she established the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community Activism.  Her 2020 book, Ella Baker’s Catalytic Leadership grew out that work and translates Ella Baker’s philosophy and praxis into tools such as radical listening (to perceive trauma and, also, resilience), productive structural analyses (to see how oppressive power is currently reinventing itself), and catalyzing leadership (creating participative spaces for people to see their personal routes to collective power). She applies these tools in all her endeavors, including as co-chair of the University Commission on History, Race, and A Way Forward, charged with leading efforts for reckoning, healing, and repair given the legacies of white supremacy and racial violence at the founding of UNC that persist as current inequities and injustices.