Enkeshi El-Amin is a community sociologist in Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Agnes Scott College. Her research, exploring the link between race and place, is focused on how racial practices shape Black places and how Black people in turn are involved in practices that define, contest, and reimagine places. As a PhD student, she completed an NSF-funded dissertation examining and analyzing the contested experiences and meanings of urban Black space in a region conventionally represented as a domain of rural white poverty. She is expanding this dissertation in her first book, for which she has signed an advanced contract with University of Kentucky Press to publish. 

 

Prior to her time at the University of Tennessee, Enkeshi completed her master’s degree in Pan African studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York and her bachelor's degree in Psychology and Africana Studies at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. 

 

Along with her research and teaching, Enkeshi maintains an active involvement in community and culture work. She is a producer and co-host of the Black In Appalachia podcast, a collaboration between East Tennessee PBS and Public Radio Exchange (PRX) that seeks to make visible the stories of Black people in and through the Appalachian region. In response to finding feelings of displacement and loss of space for Black communities in her research, Dr. El-Amin founded “The Bottom” in East Knoxville as a hub to build community, celebrate culture, and engage in the creativity of Black people.