Our October 2025 Departmental Spotlight features one of our first-year graduate students, Sam Jean-Francois, interviewed by graduate student Endria Richardson.
Do you have an alternate-universe life in which you spend your time doing something totally different from this life? What do you do? Why?
Oh, that’s easy—I’d be a hair stylist.
Throughout my life, I’ve found so much joy in the intimacy that hair holds. Growing up, I would braid my younger sister’s hair, and it became a structured act of care for the both of us. We’d watch episodes of Criminal Minds—at her request, not mine—while I greased her scalp with Blue Magic and asked how she wanted her hair to speak for her that week. Now living on the West Coast, I find myself missing those moments with her the most. While an undergrad at Bates, I fell in love with doing my own hair: box braids, Marley twists, wash-and-gos to highlight my kinky curls, and the occasional dye job. As an AMAB (assigned male at birth) femme, the ability to alter my performance of gender through my hair has been a powerfully healing and affirming experience. If I had more time, perhaps in this life I’d consider styling hair professionally more seriously. But for now, in another life, I’d be in cosmetology school, dreaming of opening my own salon.
In times of war, genocide, and fascism, what is the purpose of the kind of learning, teaching, and supporting that we do in academia? How do you understand the role of the university in politics and activism?
In times of war, genocide, and fascism—all of which, I might add, are not new to the histories of the colonized, but increasingly volatile in their repetition—the purpose of our learning and teaching must be understood as part of a larger struggle for liberation. As a former Boston youth worker and artist whose storytelling is shaped by—and in turn shapes—Black realities, my answer to this question is constantly evolving. Yet what remains central to my understanding of intellectualism in times of crisis is that it must be grounded in material reality, and by that logic, in material protest.
In a field as fluid, revolutionary, and expansive as Black Studies, it is essential that our pedagogy remain not only critical but also informed by the organizers, healers, and teachers whose traditions are integral to transgressive communal practices. In that vein, the university—as a site of both power and consumption—must reckon with its complicity if it is to become a radical site of praxis and care.
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes: “I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living,” and later that, though “theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary, it fulfills this function… when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end” (59, 61). As scholars, artists, and community members aware of the academy’s role in institutionalizing oppressive logics, our duty is to remain grounded relationally, in theory and practice, for the sake of revolution: holding ourselves accountable to the communities whose survival and freedom we care for, and challenging one another to treat the world with an ethic of care.
Our understanding of knowledge must therefore move beyond what can be taught in the classroom, and find texture in our lived experiences, ancestral memory, and radical possibility. Perhaps this expanded, embodied, and Black feminist approach to learning and teaching can meet the urgency of these times, as I know they have done in the past.
Who do you love? Writers, thinkers, artists, parents, friends—who has inspired you to be in the world the way that you are?
I love anyone I’ve been honored to name as my kin, and be named kin by—in all the ways we imagine kin to be constructed: figuratively, spiritually, and spatially.
Some kin that come to mind are my mother, my sisters, my closest friends, my neighbors, former students, and others I share with this community—such as Akwaeke Emezi, Alice Walker, Kaiama L. Glover, bell hooks, Nalo Hopkinson, and my recently passed mentor, Dr. Sue Edna Houchins.
Each of them has inspired me to speak vulnerably about my experiences in and out of this world, and of the sacred powers that are desire and pleasure. These people are ever-evolving healers, teachers, revolutionaries, lovers, dancers, singers, and world-shakers who operate under ethics of care.
Since I was a child I’ve struggled to feel tethered to the world around me. It often feels as though I am floating, or better yet phasing in and out of existence like a flickering flame. And yet, in communion with my kin, I feel not just grounded, but anchored to a knowing that is deeper than my own. Through their commitment to truth, and yearning for passion, I feel held.
What are you reading (or watching, or listening to) lately?
I’m reading a lot of zonbi content as I research social death and social resurrection and their reification within Haitian folk culture and Vodoun diasporically. I just finished Talc by Jenna Chrisphonte, which I highly recommend if you’re interested in Afro-Sci-Fi or tapestry stories.
I’m also diving into the works of Nalo Hopkinson and Edwidge Danticat—they’ve helped calm my nerves as I navigate this new phase of my life. I just finished Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and am about to begin a reread of Sister Mine, one of my personal favorites by Hopkinson.
On the screen, I’ve been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s one of my favorite forms of nonsense escapism—alongside messing with my cat Ti Pisket, little small fish, and the occasional sidequest.