Lejia Johnson

Contact information

Email: jjohnson@mccormick.edu

Department: Ministry

Jia Johnson is a social justice entrepreneur at the intersection of education, liberative praxis, and community building. She is the co-producer and co-host of the Abolition as Resurrection podcast. Johnson designed and established the Solidarity Building Initiative for Liberative Carceral Education at McCormick Theological Seminary (MTS), and currently serves as its director.

As director, she develops community-based collaborations, co-creates learning communities, and curricula that tend to the whole of incarcerated learners at the Cook County Jail and their communities of belonging. In collaboration with Kaia Stern, PhD, Johnson developed the Healing and Justice Conversation Series, a pilot partnership with the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is currently working on co-authoring a book chapter in Higher Ed in Prison Manual a project of Bloomsbury Publishing. She initiated the establishment of the Cook County Jail Higher Ed Committee for the IL-Coalition for Higher Education in Prison, and currently serves as chair.