Ewurama Okai (she/her) is a J.D./Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. Her research draws on the sociology of law, race, and culture to understand the logics of, access to, and future of civil rights enforcement. Ewurama’s proposed dissertation, tentatively titled “Un(Making) the Future of Racial Inequality Litigation,” explores how legal professionals in the civil rights field imagine and anticipate the future of litigating racial inequality. Drawing on in-depth interviews and content analysis of legal scholarship, her project examines legal professionals’ orientations to the future, and how imagined futures constitute present legal practices and discourses. Along the way, she aims to reveal the power legal professionals’ cognitive and emotional relationship to the future has in constituting legal change.
Ewurama received her Ed.M. in Higher Education from Harvard University and B.A. in Political Science from Yale University.