Nikki Young, M.Div., Th.M.

Thelathia "Nikki" Young is a doctoral candidate in the Ethics and Society Course of Study in Emory University's Graduate Division of Religion. She has an undergraduate degree in Biology from UNC-Asheville, and from Emory's Candler School of Theology, she obtained the Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees.

Her current research interests primarily include ethical issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and she finds particular interest in the ways queer communities (specifically Black Queer families) might prove to be pertinent — though previously unacknowledged — sources for sexual/social ethics.

Her dissertation, entitled "Black Queer Ethics: An Investigation into the Ethical Norms of Kinship and Family," is a work of Christian social ethics that investigates moral norms of kinship and family that foreground the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. Her work employs the praxis orientation of Womanism, the moral imagination of Feminism, and the de-centering efforts of Queer theories in order to investigate human ways of BEing.

She finds that ethics is an area of academic research and engagement that affords her the opportunity to contribute to the praxis and critical moral inquiry that is lived and understood in the diverse experiences of persons who are marginalized due to race, gender identity or expression, and/or sexual identity or expression.