Taubman College Taubman College announces Morehouse’s David Wall Rice as 2016 Sojourner Truth Fellow
Taubman College announces the appointment of David Wall Rice as the Urban and Regional Planning Program’s 2016 Sojourner Truth Fellow. Rice is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology, and Assistant Provost for Student Success, at Morehouse College.
He is also Principal Investigator of the Identity Orchestration Research Lab. The Lab explores expressions of identity balance through engagement, the exploration of varied contexts, and personal narratives. It is a strengths-based lab that works to understand and to elicit behavioral bests. Practical application of this work is found in Rice’s role as Assistant Provost for Student Success at Morehouse.
Rice is a faculty representative for Morehouse College’s Board of Trustees and is founding Co-Director of the School’s Cinema, Television and Emerging Media Studies Program. Here he has helped to develop curriculum for the film studies major and minor, and advises students across disciplines in the utility and application of modern media. He now serves as faculty for this program, and in African American Studies, with special focus on narrative studies.
He graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and earned a Doctorate in Personality Psychology from Howard University. With a Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University, Rice frequently applies his research to cultural criticism. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for The Journal of Negro Education and previously served on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Popular Culture; he has provided commentary for C-SPAN, NPR, PRI, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC; and his writings and opinion have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera America, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vibe magazine, Ebony.com and The Root among other media outlets.
His research in personality psychology and theory development is sharply focused on identity and self constructs. This is demonstrated in his book, “Balance: Advancing Identity Theory by Engaging the Black Male Adolescent,” and the text-in-progress, “Orchestration: Race, Gender, Class and Context – Being and Becoming More.” Rice’s present research attends to the psychology of strength as informed by study in Israel, Haiti, Ghana and South Africa. An emphasis on “the positive” is an approach that informs Rice’s work in identity development that finds root in youth culture, music culture, media, politics, psychology, education and faith.
He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Sojourner Truth Fellow position was created by Taubman College as a way to engage scholars and reflective practitioners who can bring into the college community rigorous attention to issues of race and ethnicity as they relate to the theory and practice of urban and regional planning. The Sojourner Truth Fellow presents lectures open to the college and general public, as well as hosting student workshops and other related events.
Rice will give the Sojourner Truth Fellow Lecture on March 10 at 5 p.m. in Rackham Auditorium.
