Wright-Johnson is a Race, Ethnicity and Politics (REP) scholar whose research in American politics sits at the intersection of political behavior, urban politics and women in politics. Using Black women as her foci, her work encourages political science to further explore Black women and their intersectional experiences to modernize and evolve normative theories of Black politics.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Wright, Andrene (2023). Telling the Tale: Black Women Politicians and Their Use of Experiential Rhetoric. Politics & Gender, 1-28. doi:10.1017/S1743923X23000077
Non Peer-Reviewed Writing
Wright, Andrene, Crawford, Claire and Lenear, India. (2023). “The Legacy of Dr. Mae C. King: NCOBPS Founders Symposium, 2023”. A Tributary piece in the National Review of Black Politics. 1-2
Book Chapters
Wright-Johnson, Andrene and Block Jr. Ray (Forthcoming) “Back to Our Roots: The Need for More Descriptive Research in Black Politics at the Local Level”. New Directions in Black Political Psychology. Camille Burge, Christine Slaughter and Jas Sullivan (editors)
Wright, Andrene and McNeely, Natasha. (2023) “I’m a Mother First: How Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ Intersecting Identities Inform her Criminal Justice Reform Policies” in Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S Politics, Vol.2. Nadia E. Brown and Sarah Allen Gershon (editors) New York, NY. Routledge
Public Scholarship
Bueno-Vasquez, Michelle and Wright-Johnson, Andrene (Forthcoming) “The Face of a Movement: Colorism and Racism in the Evaluation of Black Women Leaders” Center for American Women and Politics
Wright-Johnson, Andrene (2024) in “Black Women’s Politics Research Spotlight” Center for American Women and Politics
Wright, Andrene Z. May 7, 2022. “Black Motherhood Shapes Leadership in Unique Ways” The Washington Post
Block Jr, Ray, Wright, Andrene and Powel, Mia “Americans Remain Hopeful about Democracy Despite Fears of its Demise” The Conversation
Works In Progress
Wright-Johnson, Andrene and Block Jr. Ray “Behind and Beside the White Coat: An Analysis of Racially Concordant concern with Discrimination in Health Care” (Under review)
Bueno, Michelle and Wright, Andrene “The Face of a Movement: Colorism and Racism in the Evaluations of Black Women Leaders” (In preparation for submission)
Gender Ties(?) and Racial Divides: Black Women Candidates and White Women’s Support
Dissertation, 2022
Wright’s dissertation When They Enter: Black Women’s Politics in U.S Urban Centers, serves as an exploratory platform predicated on Black women mayors’ role in African American politics, specifically their leadership approach and its public reception. Paper one explores the rhetorical choices of Black women mayors and how these choices differ from their race and gendered counterparts. In this paper, I formalized a concept termed “Experiential Rhetoric,” defined as the deployment of a candidate’s lived experience as a means of persuasion. Experiential rhetoric has its roots in Black feminist scholarship because “lived experience,” as a concept, is situated and validated, there. I then use Black feminist tenets to inform a coding scheme that further analyzes rhetorical speech among Black women mayors when advocating for their policy preferences on the campaign trail. Paper two is motivated by Gershon’s (2013) and Philpot and Walton’s (2007) contributions and examines white women voters’ lack of gendered support for Black women politicians. Through a representative sample of over 1,000 white women voters, I sought to validate and contextualize the claims that gendered consciousness does not exist between Black and white women, by exploring what conditions would yield the greatest support for Black women politicians. Lastly, my findings from Paper one, that Black women politicians leverage their lived experience more than their race and gendered counterparts, serves as my motivation for paper three, where I run a survey experiment on 1,000 Black voters to explore how identity-salient frames are perceived.
Dissertation Committee: Dr. Alvin Tillery (chair), Dr. Reuel Rogers, Dr. Jennifer Nash (Duke University), Dr. Tabitha Bonilla
Funded by the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy (CSDD)
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