Description

Episode 36
Guest: Nathan Stephens, MSW
Host: Shimon Cohen, LCSW

Nathan Stephens, Assistant Professor of Social Work at Illinois State University and PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, shares his powerful journey from incarceration to academia and community leadership. He speaks candidly about childhood trauma, spirituality, and the transformative role of education in his life, highlighting how his experiences shape his teaching, research, and work with Black men and boys. Nathan discusses issues such as racialized stress, the hypersexualization and sexual abuse of Black boys and men, and the systemic barriers created by hypersurveillance and criminal records. This conversation centers lived experience as expertise and calls for justice-rooted approaches in both social work and society.

In this episode:

• Nathan's journey from incarceration through healing, education, and into social work academia
• How lived experience informs his teaching, research, and community work with Black men and youth
• Racialized stress and the trauma of hypersexualization and sexual abuse of Black boys and men
• Hypersurveillance in Black and Brown communities and the systemic barriers created by arrest records
• Teaching Social Justice in Social Work inside a prison and creating programs for Black men in the community

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Music credit
"District Four" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/