Meet Brittany

I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, one of the most historically complex cities in the country, where the legacies of racial hierarchy and civic resistance are written into the landscape itself. That environment gave me an early and unfiltered education in how power works, who it protects, and who it leaves behind. It also gave me a mother, aunt, and grandmother whose faith, intellectual curiosity, and discipline taught me to read the world critically and act on what I found.

I took that foundation into a career that has spanned political campaigns, advocacy organizations, party leadership, and community groups across more than twenty states. I have managed digital advertising campaigns for candidates and causes, developed communications strategies for elected officials, increased voter turnout through targeted community messaging, and built digital infrastructure for organizations working to expand civic participation. I have worked behind the scenes on over 130 successful campaigns, and I have seen firsthand what happens when communication serves a campaign, or a single person, rather than a community.

The experience of watching political communication perform representation without delivering it, is what drives my research. Working for elected officials from here in Prince George’s County to the Dallas/Fort Worth area, I have not just observed the gap between political promises and civic reality. I have lived and worked inside it.

The Research

I am an admitted doctoral student in Communication, Culture, and Media at Howard University, where I will pursue research at the intersection of communication theory, political science, and cultural studies. My research initiative, More Than a Vote: Building Community Power in the Age of Performative Politics, examines the structural patterns that define, and too often undermine, communication between elected officials and the communities they represent.

The research operates on two tracks simultaneously: analyzing what accountable, community-centered political communication looks like in practice, and developing a replicable framework that equips communities to critically interpret institutional messaging, identify what is deliberately absent from public discourse, and engage civic and political life with greater agency and clarity. My goal is not only to advance communication scholarship but to produce tools that communities can actually use, whether or not their elected officials decide to cooperate.

My work draws on frameworks from political communication, media studies, and critical cultural theory, with particular attention to how institutional silence functions as a deliberate communicative strategy and how the design of civic access shapes what communities can and cannot say back to power.