October 2026

Jerome E. Morris is the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Urban Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He is the current president of AERA and was named an AERA Fellow in 2022.

October 19, 2026

In October 2026, I embarked on a 16-day journey around the world to bring my annual theme as president of the American Educational Research Association to life: “Transcending borders and boundaries in education research: Toward a beloved global community.” A car took me to a plane. A plane took me to a country. A bike took me to a museum. A bus took me to a university. A high-speed train took me to a city. But walking, of all modes of transportation, allowed me to experience communities deeply and engage with people.

The great playwright August Wilson often noted that people’s specific stories, particularly those on the margins of society, reveal universal truths about who we are as humans. The specific can become universal when it captures the complexities, tensions, pains, and joys of human life.

My research over the past three decades has drawn on interdisciplinary perspectives to understand the ecosystem of Black education in the United States. What, then, does a journey around the world—and a focus on a “beloved global community”—have to do with transcending borders and boundaries in education research? How can it help us better understand the institutional structures and cultures of schools, the politics of education, and the experiences of historically marginalized communities?

I was born in 1968 in Birmingham, Alabama. I am one of seven children, six boys and one girl, raised by our mother in a Birmingham public housing project known as Central City. I attended and graduated from the city’s all-Black public schools, located in arguably the poorest zip code in the United States at the time.

In 1985, after seeing an announcement on our high school’s bulletin board about a scholarship for a two-week cultural-immersion program in Japan, I applied and was selected as one of four students. Birmingham and Hitachi City, Japan, had a sister-city relationship, and the city of Birmingham and the Birmingham public school system jointly funded the program. As students, two Black and two White, we traveled to Japan as “ambassadors” to share the city’s new commitment to moving away from its sordid past of racial injustice. My teachers had encouraged me to apply and even gave me feedback on my essay and application. Local Black civic organizations and churches, knowing my family’s dire economic conditions, took me shopping and made sure I had the appropriate attire for my trip. These communal bonds would have a lasting impact on my personal and academic life.

One year later, during my senior year of high school, I was one of 31 high school students across the United States who received a scholarship for a summer study program in one of three countries: Egypt, Tunisia, or Jordan. The program aimed to provide a more balanced understanding of how people of Arab descent are misrepresented in U.S. society and globally. I went to Jordan.

Four years later, in 1990, after graduating from college, I participated in a summer internship in Cairo, Egypt, working with a community center on the outskirts of the city, teaching English to Muslim and Christian women and men. While in Egypt, I witnessed Black Sudanese Christian refugees fleeing their country because of an impending genocide.

In late August 1990, on the eve of the Persian Gulf War, I left Egypt and moved back into the public housing project in Birmingham. Once again, I experienced the day-to-day challenges of what some would call ghetto life. Without a car, I walked my community daily, whether going to the local convenience store or substitute teaching at my former elementary and high schools—both across the street from where we lived. I witnessed how global affairs and government-supported shipping and distribution of narcotics were exacting a devastating toll on our community, family, and friends, especially those who had been pushed out of school.

Years later, as a graduate student and faculty member at universities, I continued to travel internationally, particularly to North, South, East, and West Africa, as well as the Caribbean and South America, to learn about the experiences of Black people globally.

As I write this, still on my 16-day journey around the world, I continue to walk through communities and observe everyday activities and the transmission of knowledge and culture, but now through a researcher’s eyes. Whether walking down a London street; pedaling a bike through a neighborhood in Paris; visiting a temple in Taipei where Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism share the same space; witnessing the intergenerational practice of Candomblé in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; or participating in the celebration of Emancipation Day on a Toronto train ride, I can even see more of how the Central City public housing project in Birmingham, where I was raised, represented a microcosm of historically marginalized communities throughout the world. Earlier opportunities to travel globally help connect the dots between what people in places like Birmingham experience and what people experience globally. I continue to see parallels between Birmingham and other marginalized people worldwide, whether in Brazilian favelas or South African townships.

As researchers, we can travel the world to learn more about a phenomenon. We can also observe locally and deepen our understanding when we ensure our research frameworks, theoretical and conceptual groundings, and methodologies are human-centered, co-created with communities, and inclusive of people’s epistemologies. I would call this a “beloved research approach” because its goal is not only to understand but also to work toward collective human flourishing.

This means asking questions that matter to the communities we study, listening to how people understand their own experiences, and recognizing that they have knowledge to contribute to our research. It also means being willing to rethink our assumptions about communities and what we can learn from them.

Through my experiences, I see differences, commonalities, and shared human experiences around the world. At the same time, people have often used these differences to create divisions between “us” and “them.” If we can see our shared humanity in these varied or specific experiences, then we can recognize the beloved community that exists beyond nations, governments, boundaries, and borders. In my travels and notes from around the world, I am finding that a human-centered way of researching requires a sociopolitical consciousness that vigilantly ensures equity, mutuality, reciprocity, and, dare I say, love.