About Us
Liberation through research, design, and community.
LFPS is a Black women–led praxis studio transforming data, design, and storytelling into liberatory infrastructures of care.
Who We Are
The Liberatory Futures Praxis Studio (LFPS) merges research, creative design, and community engagement to dismantle systemic harm across public health, education, and reproductive justice.
We partner with private and public organizations, local and state governments, and academic spaces to design equity-centered, abolitionist tools and infrastructures.
Rooted in Black feminist thought, our work transforms evidence into tools, stories, and structures that help communities thrive.
Emma Blackson, MPH, M.S., and Briana Williams, MPH, co-founders of LFPS, are pictured here leading a participatory workshop on envisioning clinics free from surveillance and punishment.
Our Team
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Co-Founder
Emma Blackson (she/her) is a public health strategist and scholar-practitioner whose work examines how structural violence—especially in education and policing—shapes reproductive and perinatal health. She brings deep expertise in maternal and child health, structural racism metrics, and liberatory research design, translating complex data into tools for justice.
At LFPS, Emma anchors the studio’s structural analysis and policy strategy, blending quantitative rigor with cultural insight to build research that serves liberation and community power.
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Co-Founder
Briana Williams (she/her) is a public health researcher and cultural strategist whose work centers reproductive justice, global Black health, and human-centered design. She has collaborated with Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities across the Americas to reimagine sexual and reproductive health through participatory, culturally grounded approaches.
At LFPS, Briana leads with global Black solidarity and participatory design, ensuring the studio’s work is multilingual, accessible, and rooted in collective transformation.
Our Theory of Change
Knowledge → Capacity → Redistribution
We believe liberation is built through iterative cycles of knowledge, capacity, and redistribution.
Build Knowledge – Conduct research and data justice audits that expose and challenge structural harm.
Build Capacity – Translate those findings into tools, curricula, and community learning spaces.
Build Futures – Redistribute resources and power through open-access education and fiscal transparency.
Our Ethos
Liberation over reform: We design beyond compliance toward collective freedom.
Care as infrastructure: We embed rest, review, and redistribution into every system we build.
Transparency & accountability: Every partnership, dollar, and dataset is treated as public trust.
Our Story: From Collaboration to Collective Praxis
2021 — Shared Beginnings
Emma and Briana met as doctoral students at Tulane University, finding instant alignment in how they approached research, justice, and care. What began as casual conversations about public health and harm became the foundation for a partnership rooted in imagination and accountability.
2023 — Building Through Research
Their collaboration deepened while working as research assistants on an NIH-funded project examining the intersections of policing, structural racism, and Black birthing experiences. Together, they conducted and analyzed interviews, led secondary data analysis, and co-authored publications that linked state violence to reproductive health outcomes.
2024 — Expanding the Work
As research associates at Tulane’s Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence, they led projects exploring how structural racism and anti-Blackness appear in health literature, algorithms, and public discourse. Their work bridged qualitative inquiry, data science, and community ethics, laying the groundwork for what would become LFPS.
2025 — Founding the Studio
On Juneteenth 2025, they debuted The Liberatory Futures Praxis Studio with a workshop titled “Criminalization as a Public Health Issue” at the Louisiana Abortion Fund’s Resisting Criminalization symposium. The response confirmed what they already knew: the world needed spaces where research could be practiced as liberation.
2025 — Building Infrastructure & Creative Tools
LFPS was formally registered in Texas and later expanded to Pennsylvania, two geographies central to the founders’ roots. The early months focused on building systems of care and design, producing the studio’s first creations:
Zines & Storytelling: Lethal Exposure and Sex Ed: Consent, Care, and Culture
Interactive Activities: Liberation Mapping and Justice Timeline
Framework Tools: The Praxis Toolkit: For Everyday Visionaries
2026 & Looking Ahead — Scaling Down to Grow Deep
LFPS now moves intentionally through three pillars: Research + Data Justice, Education + Design for Liberation, and Community + Narrative Power, and prepares to launch the RJ in the Time of Fascism series and Liberation Lab membership community. LFPS continues to grow as a living experiment in liberatory public health, bridging data and design, policy and storytelling, and local roots with global solidarity.
Our goal remains clear: to build infrastructures of care that outlast us and futures that honor where we’ve been.
Partnerships & Recognition
“The Liberatory Futures Praxis Studio partnered with the Louisiana Abortion Fund to present "Criminalization is a Public Health Issue" at LAAF's inaugural Resisting Criminalization Community Symposium on Juneteenth, 2025. This interactive session explored the intersections of policing, education, and Afro-descendant reproductive health, examining how systems of criminalization impact communities across borders. As a Black women-led organization deeply rooted in reproductive justice principles, LAAF was thrilled to host this collaboration with LFPS, which became one of the symposium's most well-attended sessions, drawing community partners from Tulane University and beyond. Through embodied activities, data storytelling, and liberation mapping exercises, LFPS facilitated critical conversations about transforming harm into healing and building collective visions of care without surveillance or punishment. We look forward to partnering with LFPS on future events and continuing our collaborative work toward liberation.”