Born and raised in Ghana, Joseph “Piko” Ewoodzie ’06 recalls visiting one of several slave castles there as a young adult. Though most of these big buildings had been built as trading posts, they had quickly evolved into prisons that held men and women captive under horrific conditions until they were transported as slaves to the New World and Caribbean.

“At the time [of my first visit], I didn’t know the other side of the story. I didn’t know the African American history side of the experience,” he says.

Several years later, he went to a slave castle again. This time, he was traveling with students in the Ithaca College Martin Luther King Scholar Program, and his experience was entirely different from his first. He remembers being led to one of the rooms of the slave castle with a friend and being locked inside for five minutes.

“I couldn’t make it through the whole thing without just bawling,” he says. “Both of us cried.”

Ewoodzie says his travels with the MLK Scholar Program helped shape him as an ethnographer. Though his major was sociology, Ewoodzie describes himself as a storyteller. Indeed, he is full of accounts like the one about his transformative experience in Ghana, and it is his own story about his time at Ithaca College that he says served as the foundation for where he is now and the future he’s shaping for himself.

As a visiting instructor of sociology at Kenyon College and a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Ewoodzie is pursuing a doctoral degree in sociology.

After seeing a documentary about obesity in graduate school, Ewoodzie traveled to Mississippi to study how food matters to African Americans of different socioeconomic statuses. He spent months observing people beginning with the homeless and the lower classes, and then working his way up.

“The objective was [to find out] what food is available to them, how they choose what they eat, and how they actually eat. If eating is a social activity, who do they eat with, what do they eat on, and how long does it take for them to eat?” he says.

Ewoodzie’s research is still taking shape, but he says the MLK program at IC planted the research bug in him. He traveled to Brazil, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica. For each trip, he designed a research project based on a question he had about the country he was traveling to. When he got to the country, Ewoodzie spoke with the local people to find the answer to his question.

In addition to being an MLK scholar, Ewoodzie became a resident assistant (R.A.) during the second semester of freshman year. In that first semester, he was placed in Terrace 10, a residence for upperclassmen.

Despite being the “young kid,” Ewoodzie stuck with it and to this day he says he applies a lot of the lessons he learned in his classroom.

“I’m teaching now, and all those ways of managing a group of people—getting them to buy in, earning their trust—are things you learn as an R.A. For me, that’s translated into being a professor.”

Ewoodzie will start next fall as an assistant professor of sociology at Davidson College in North Carolina.

“I want to teach college students how to think, how to write, how to get excited about the complications of the world,” he says. “The other is to know how to do research.”

Ewoodzie’s experience in the MLK Scholar Program helped shape the way he does research today. By studying other peoples’ lives and experiences, he also feels he is discovering his own interests: “I ended up becoming somebody who dreams of writing books and getting published, and it’s all because of my experiences at Ithaca College.”