Paris D. Wicker (She/Her/Hers)

Paris Wicker(she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University at Buffalo (Territory of the Seneca Nation). Her interdisciplinary research, informed by a decade of higher education experience in student affairs and college admissions, contributes to scholarship that explores the conditions and consequences of success and well-being in higher education, especially for Black and Indigenous students, faculty, and staff. Throughout her career, Paris's combination of counseling training, student affairs experiences, and research has been at the intersections of well-being, campus climate, anti-racist and race-conscious policy and practice, and organizational change towards equity and justice. She offers a combination of mixed and multi-methods research on relational, educational, and health-equity research on higher education to improve educational experiences and outcomes.

Paris especially enjoys using interviews, surveys, and social network analysis, with guidance from Critical and Indigenous frameworks such as Critical Race Theory, Social Network Theory, Relational Sociology of Education, and Relationality. While the problems within education are not new, her research offers innovative methodological and practical implications into the full extent of inequity in higher education. Paris leads with a renewed moral imperative to broaden the purpose, goal, and outcome of higher education to include well-being as not only a means to other notions of success, such as degree attainment, but also a worthy end goal in and of itself.

Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Wisconsin Center for Educational Research (WCER), and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) , and published in the Review of Higher Education, the Journal of College Student Development, and the Journal of College Access

Another area of interest for Paris is incorporating contemplative and mindfulness-based equity research, policy, and practice within higher education. She began a formal meditation in 2018 and meditates daily through a Vipassana or insight tradition. Paris is progressing towards Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher Training certification and facilitates a number of mindfulness and equity-based classes and workshops every year.

• PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (2023)
• MSE, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Professional Counseling- Student Affairs and College Counseling (2017)
• BA, Lawrence University, Music (Vocal), French and Francophone Studies (2008)

• Dissertation of the Year Award Semifinalist (Division J- Postsecondary Education); American Educational Research Association (Division J); 2024-04-14;
• Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society Induction; University of Wisconsin-Madison; 2023-03-09;
• Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship; Ford Foundation; 2022-09-01;
• Marshall B. Hulbert ’26 Young Alumni Outstanding Service Award; Lawrence University; 2022-06-11;
• Graduate Research Fellow; Institute of Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin- Madison; 2020-10-01;

• Wicker, P. (2023). Well-being consciousness and college access borderlands: Staff perspectives on supporting students’ well-being. Journal of College Access. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jca/vol8/iss1/3
• Wicker, P., McCoy, D.L., Winkle-Wagner, R., & Barnes, I. (2023). A Web of Support: A Critical Narrative Analysis of Black Women’s Relationships in STEM Disciplines. Review of Higher Education. Advance online publication on Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/rhe.0.a900428
• Benson, J., Wicker, P., Barnes, I., & Winkle-Wagner, R. (In Press) Community and culture: Black women reminiscing on their experiences in college transition programs. Journal of College Student Development.

• Wicker, P. (2024). The consequences of getting it right: Navigating anti-blackness in quantitative statistics courses [essay]. In S. David (Ed.) Being #BlackintheIvory: Truth-telling about Racism in the American University. University of North Carolina Press

• Wicker, P. (2022) A Critical Policy Review of Well-Being and Equity Policy at Historically Black, Tribal, and Predominately White Colleges and Universities brief]. National Resource Center for the First-year Experience and Students In Transition. https://sc.edu/nrc/system/pub_files/1650047445_0.pdf

• Wicker, P. (September 2023). Critical Qualitative Inquiry. Guest Lecture. Arizona State University;
• Wicker, P.D. (June 20, 2023). Perspectives on Mindfulness, Culture, and Social Justice. Human Flourishing Workshop. Center for Healthy Minds. Madison, WI,;

• Smith, R., Brown, M., Henderson, T., & Wicker, P. (November 2023). Advancing Social Network Analytic Theory and Methods in Research on College Students [Interactive Symposium]. Association for the Study of Higher Education Annual Conference. Minneapolis, MN.;
• Wicker, P., Winkle-Wagner, R., Goosby, B., & Cheadle, J. E. (August 2023). Black Feminist Approaches to Homophily within the Social Support Networks of Tenure-line Black Women Faculty [Paper Session]. Association for Black Sociologists Conference. Philadelphia, PA.;
• Wicker, P.D., Winkle-Wagner, R., & Goosby, B. (April 2023). An exploratory egocentric social network analysis of tenure-track Black faculty women’s social support. [Roundtable session]. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.;