Lisa R. Merriweather
Lisa R. Merriweather has brought social justice to the forefront of the field of adult education throughout her more than twenty years as both scholar and practitioner. Earning her doctorate in adult education from the University of Georgia and promotion to professor of adult education in Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Merriweather’s wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work addresses pressing needs within adult education.
With Africana philosophical thought as foundation, Merriweather, a prolific scholar and qualitative researcher, explores culturally liberative mentorship, particularly in graduate education and in the professoriate, as well as racial equity in adult learning spaces: museum (non-formal), doctoral education (formal), and Spoken Word (informal). Her passion is deconstructing ideas to restructure language as a means of interrupting anti-Black racism and promoting pro-Blackness in adult education practice, theory, and research. As a critical race scholar, she consistently challenges students, peers, administrators, and community-based individuals to unpack their complicity in the national project of racial animus and pushes adult educators to be alert to how societal systems and institutional structures contribute to the silencing and erasure of racially minoritized populations. Using historical and societal contexts as her muse, she “invites readers and interlocutors to a space of reflection through (re)presenting and (re)languaging racialized experiences” of the oppressed and disenfranchised.
From that muse, Merriweather created a vibrant ideological tapestry, authoring more than seventy-five publications and sixty presentations, including coediting the 2020 edition of the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education, Trauma in Adult and Higher Education: Conversations and Critical Reflections (2022), and Convictions of Conscience: How Voices from the Margins Inform Public Actions and Educational Leadership (2019) in addition to publishing in Adult Learning, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, and the Journal of Adult and Continuing Education. She is part of the historic coeditor team for Adult Education Quarterly boasting four coeditors born in different countries with three identifying as Black and Brown women. Her most notable contribution to social justice in academic scholarship, however, is the cofounding of Dialogues in Social Justice: An Adult Education Journal in 2016 to address the lack of publications related to equity, diversity, and inclusion in the field. The journal, for which she was senior editor until 2022, makes a significant and necessary contribution to the discourse of the field.
As a tireless voice for social justice through adult education, Merriweather has a profound awareness of the need to expand the reach of adult learning in other arenas and to infuse poignant concepts relating to race and equity into the field. In much of her work, race and equity are interrogated at the nexus of differing but connected disciplines such as adult education and Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM). This was the product of a competitive grant through the National Science Foundation—Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate directorate.
Though Merriweather has held various positions of leadership within adult education professional organizations including the Steering Committee for the Adult Education Research Conference, Commission of Professors of Adult Education Executive Council, Cyril O. Houle Award Review Committee member, and president-elect for the Adult Higher Education Alliance, which promotes adult learning within higher education, her innovative thinking regarding social justice, and her dedication to it, are throughlines transversing her adult education career: teaching, scholarship, and service. Merriweather’s own commitment to social justice, realized through the ministry of mentorship and a vision for racial equity, was born from familial and God’s love for humanity. Her living hope is evident in the people with whom she is humbled to work and mentor such as new faculty members, many of them Black women, and the nearly forty Black doctoral students she assisted in fulfilling their dreams of “becoming”. This dedication was honored in 2023 when she received the Alan Mandell Mentoring Award and being named in 2024 as Faculty Fellow in the Center for ADVANC(ing) Faculty Success which has the potential to reshape cross-cultural mentoring at her institution.
Merriweather’s 2018 “Black is Beautiful” entry in the Black Power Encyclopedia marked a new beginning of contributions to racial social justice, a beginning of which she did not realize she needed to embark. “Black is Beautiful” was a reminder of hope and promise of self-love. It was joy drawn in bold, colorful machinations of afrofutrism that ignited the next wave of reimagining the world through the blurred lines of scholarship and the arts, emboldening her to show up in the fullness of her authentic self as a mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece, friend, joyographist, photographer, pianist, and creative. Merriweather follows in the footsteps and stands on the shoulders of the many before her who beat the drum for racial justice.