Jessica Oler
PhD Student
Gender Studies
Supervisor: Katherine McKittrick
Research interests: Gender Studies, Black Studies, Narrative Medicine, Black Geography, the Arts, Environmental Racism, Medical Racism, Black Feminist Theory, Black Disability Studies
Jessica Oler鈥檚 goal is to rigorously consider unprotected (black) female flesh (Spillers, 1987) through photography, installation, and narrative writing. With black geographic thought as the base for her thinking, she peels back the layers of the creation, lived experience, and inseparable systemic ideologies of the existence of unprotected (black) female flesh from a disease development perspective. Oler is interested in how questions of health, (narrative) medicine, wellness, and unwellness, which are animated by scientific racism, can be undone and subverted through artistic expression. Her research program seeks to subvert, reshape, and overcome practices of dispossession by centering new aesthetics of black femininity and placemaking that hones in on black joy amongst systems that perpetuate the aggression of oppression.
In 2021 she was invited by Harvard School of Medicine to be one of the three interviewees (patients) for The Healing Power of Stories: Narrative Theory and Narrative Practice. With the structural guidance of then medical student Michael Alcala, Oler wrote her narrative post diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
She holds three associate degrees in Sociology, Liberal Arts, and Social Science from Sacramento City College; a bachelor鈥檚 degree in Sociology from San Francisco State University; and a Masters of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts.
Her work has been shown at California College of the Arts, Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts and History, Chautauqua, Rochester, and Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; Lawrenceville and Atlanta, Georgia; Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; and Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia.