Jesse Hartley, MS, MSW

Jesse Hartley, MS, MSW, is a doctoral student at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work. Her previous community, educational, and professional experience inspires her research, which examines the impact of historical and present-day structural violence rooted in white supremacy and anti-Blackness. She explores social work’s unwillingness to address the field’s complicity in upholding and reinforcing white supremacy in educational and social welfare spaces. Employing interdisciplinary scholarship, Hartley aims to support the agency of marginalized individuals in the interest of disrupting, dismantling, and ultimately abolishing toxic systems and hegemonic social work practices. She believes social workers, particularly those who are white, must continuously question how our actions maintain the dysfunctional status quo of systems of disenfranchisement–including academia. Hartley holds a bachelor of psychology from University of Southern Mississippi and a master of clinical psychology from Mississippi State University, and a master of social work from Tulane University.