ABOUT DJ JOHN

Dj/Chicago Native.

Dj John has been Djing in the Chicago area since 2015, and has also Dj’d all accross Southern California from clubs to community events. Dj John has a wide range of Dj styles often fusing genres like Hip-Hop, R&B, Reggaetton, Afro-pop, Amapiano, Juke, House, Bachata, Reggae, Dembow, Bollywood, and Pop.

Sign: Sagittarius

College: Pomona College (May 2023)

Major: Africana Studies (May 2023)

Africana Studies Scholar. (Research Statement)

Growing up in Englewood, I became passionate about education as a avenue for freedom through reading Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Dubois. I want to be an educator using both Black history and Black expressive culture as a focal point. I am interested in studying how scholars within the Black radical tradition use abolitionist pedagogy and organizing to counter systemic anti-blackness in schools that often constructs black students as deviant or bad. What does a liberatory education and praxis look like?

I use music as a way to engage and heal people while still trying to preserve and connect to Black music history. Many black and brown communities articulate alternative modalities of living through cultural expression. A creative expression like deejaying offers a way to use music, movement, and the archive of black joy encompassed in the records, to curate an experience and lens into a future where black people, to use Saidiya Hartman’s words, live otherwise. Creation opens an avenue for both mediating and handling grief, as well as the routinized violence of the afterlife of slavery. Creative practices must be embraced as pedagogical tools and organizing strategies because they contribute both to coalition building, and also hold their own conventions, histories, and archives useful for the liberation of oppressed people. 

My research attempts to address the question: What are the conditions of possibility for black pleasure, joy, and resistance during a time that many scholars call the nadir of black life in the U.S.? My work sits at the intersection of performance, education, and radical politics. I utilize both an Afro-pessimists and a Black Queer Feminists lens to interrogate sites of joy, pleasure, and resistance.

In the long term, the goal of my research is to investigate not only the way pedagogical and cultural understandings of discipline render black students deviant, but also the ways that black folk continue to forge liberatory praxes while working within and against the anti-black school system. As a young thinker, activist, and creative dedicated to actively building relationships with pedagogues in multiple disciplines, I am devoted to the liberation of black and brown young folk in communities like Englewood in Chicago.

Research Interests

• Black Cultural Expressive Practice

• Liberatory/Abolitionists Education

• Afro-pessimism, Anti-Blackness, #Blackcrit

• Black Radical Tradition and Black Radical Feminism

• Africana Political Theory

• Law, Carcerality, and Politics

• Black Literature and Afro-futurism

Black Visual Artists

I have been doing photography since 2017 and videography since 2019. I offer a wide range of services from drone work to creative editing. As a Black visual artists I am interested in pushing the limits of beauty and life, by documenting the ways that black folk live in our world. I am interested in capturing Chicago’s stories through video and photography, so that new voices are able to enter Chicago’s history.