Rate My Professor Laura McTighe

McTighe earned her Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University in 2017. She is now Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University and co-founder of Front Porch Research Strategy, a Black feminist applied institute for participatory research in the South. She has contributed to movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for more than twenty-five years, co-founding projects such as TEACH Outside, Prison Health News, Project UNSHACKLE, and the Tallahassee Bail Fund. Her research centers collaborative knowledge production as theory and method for analyzing violences of gendered racial capitalism and building liberatory futures, with interests in race, religion, abolition, mutual aid, and Black feminist liberation. Key publications include Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Duke University Press, 2024, co-authored with Women With a Vision), which received the 2025 Edie Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing; "Front porch revolution: Resilience space, demonic grounds, and the horizons of a black feminist otherwise" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2018); "Theory on the ground: Ethnography, religio-racial study, and the spiritual work of building otherwise" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2020); "The ground on which we stand: making abolition" (Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 2020); and editor of the "Religio-Racial Identity" forum (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2020). She serves as principal investigator on two Henry Luce Foundation-funded public humanities projects: “Creating the World Anew: Religion, Economy, and Mutual Aid” and “The Callie House Project: Religion and Public Health in the Black Experience in the American South,” aligning with her forthcoming book Abolition is Sacred Work.