Education: 

• PhD, Sociology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2025
• MA, Social Impact Assessment, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, 2018
• BA, Social Work, North-West University, South Africa, 2015

Principal Research Interests

My research area of interest is on how the social constructs of gender and race are stratified and their inequalities thereof. Specifically, the interactions of gender and race and how they shape the dimensions in which black women experience their daily lives. Since 2019 my research has been focused on the effects of socio-racial inequalities that black women experience because of beauty standards and societal formulations/ ideals of physical attractiveness. Thus, my dissertation study investigation was on black women’s beauty conceptualizations, daily beauty enactments, and their resistance towards the mainstream societal beauty norms at the intersections of race, and gender, and the effects of beauty socialization on these, if at all.

Research Areas: 

• Gender and Racial Inequalities
• Beauty Standards/ Ideals
• African American Studies
• Internal Labor Migration

Email: kmokoene@lasierra.edu
Phone: 951-785-2305

Representative Publications

1. Mokoene, Kearabetswe Z, and G. Khunou. 2019. “Parental Absence: Intergenerational tensions and contestations of social grants in South Africa.” Critical Social Policy 00(0): 1-16 doi: 10.1177/0261018319867583.
2. Mokoene, Kearabetswe Z, and G. Khunou. 2020. “Young Mothers, Labor Migration, and Social Security” in Rugunanan P. and Xulu-Gama, N (ed). Migration in Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Springer [IMISCOE Research Series].