Transitional Intelligence in Action
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Transitional Intelligence in Action 〰️
The transitional intelligence framework is developed from recognizing patterns and needs in multiple fields and domains in terms of how crises are navigated and how vulnerable or marginalized communities may respond within those transitional periods of instability. Take a look below to see how this work is evolving simultaneously in the fields of space, cybersecurity, public health & reproductive justice, mortality systems, spirituality, and creative and healing traditions:
The Cosmos: The Universe as a Transitional Space
The ISS to LEO Satellite Transition Project
Developing a 3-article publication under Project MARIE for her Space Operations dissertation that will simultaneously function as real-world field projects, Victoria will be working on the upcoming International Space Station deorbit and subsequent transition to privatized LEO satellites as a 7-year project while alongside NASA and international scientists on mission assurance effectiveness and success evaluation through the transitional intelligence theory.
The study will not only analyze the needs and challenges of the upcoming ISS retirement, but also how the international community may be affected by the transition to the incoming privatized LEO satellites physically, socially, culturally, and politically, and what are the best ways to navigate any anticipated crisis scenarios.
Satellite & Laser Ambiguous Interference, Attribution and Escalation Studies
Victoria is also utilizing her transitional intelligence framework to study the phenomenon of satellite and laser ambiguous interference, inclusive of cyber takeovers, satellite on satellite confrontation, kinetic anti-satellite attacks, solar weather and radiation attacks, electromagnetics crises, re-entry crises, attribution and escalation scenarios
This work will go on to be utilized in the operational development of the specialized tactical Cyber Defense Team to help provide necessary emergency management tools and models for local communities even in the face of large-scale national security matters.
The Deep Space Playbook
Also a part of Victoria’s dissertation work and TIC field projects is studying how the transitional intelligence framework can be applied to mission assurance during critical system degradation across increasing Earth-distance in three main environments: cislunar/lunar operations, interplanetary transit, and Mars travel operations.
This work will be presented as a playbook of various protocols, guides, and simulation scenarios, with field exercises to be enacted and evaluated amongst a team of scientists, engineers, and researchers for planetary mission assurance purposes.
Simulation exercises and field research will not only focus on technical and physical aspects, but also on social, mental, and emotional concepts and scenarios that may introduce additional vulnerability states.
The first phase of the playbook will extend for 3 years and encompass part of the upcoming dissertation work in Project MARIE. The Deep Space Playbook will then continue to be updated annually with a variety of additional space travel mission scenarios and protocol guides based on research and field-based simulation scenarios.
Cybersecurity: The Digital World as a Transitional Space
Cyber Crisis Response & Regional Resilience
With the Cyber Regional Resilience and Crisis Response Project under TIC’s Mission JIGSAW, the goal is to develop practical tools and systems to equip communities and regions with non-privatized, updated cybersecurity systems and models for education, protection, and awareness. This project will work to implement both a prevention-based/non-emergency and crisis response cyber team, both of Victoria’s design:
The Digital Safety Collaboratives will be the prevention-based/non-emergency arm developed in partnership with libraries and community organizations. Digital Safety Collaboratives focus on prevention and education to provide accessible community guidance on a variety of digital topics, inclusive of digital self-care and privacy, scam awareness and prevention, cyberstalking and online harassment, identity theft, open-source intelligence, digital estate and ghost fraud preparedness, AI literacy, data center literacy, and education around emerging technology.
The tactical Cyber Defense Team model development and implementation will serve as phase III under the Specialized First Responder Crisis Teams Project and phase II under the Cyber Regional Resilience and Crisis Response Project. This team will consist of local law enforcement officers, firefighters, EMS personnel, 911 dispatchers, and cybersecurity professionals trained to provide first responder services during the event of a mass cyber-attack or during high-risk regional crises as a result of cyber-attacks and disasters arising from cyber events.
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Community BSides
With the goal of helping to establish a recognizable cybersecurity community in South Georgia, Victoria has received guidance and permission from the international organization of BSides to establish a regional chapter. This chapter will work alongside established chapters in nearby cities, such as Augusta, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Charleston, with the primary deliverable of establishing an annual cybersecurity conference in the region.
This conference will aim to bring together not only seasoned BSides presenters, but also other professionals, researchers, hackers, and advocates in the cybersecurity field. This conference is planned to have a variety of themes, inclusive of digital security, penetration testing, threat intelligence, and aerospace/space security & operations. Some of the public-facing work of TIC will also be presented at this upcoming conference.
Overall, the goal of establishing chapters such as BSides and DefCon is to help strengthen and solidify a cybersecurity community socially and educationally while also equipping the region with a community-empowered free or low-cost tech resource event.
DEF CON
Victoria has also received permission from DEF CON, the world’s largest and oldest annual convention for hackers, security researchers, hardware modders, and legal professionals, to establish a regional chapter as well.
This chapter, which will officially launch in the fall of 2026, will serve as a social community for local hackers and security professionals to discuss their projects, learn new skills, and travel to upcoming security events together, including the annual DEF CON conference in Las Vegas, NV.
DEF CON will largely work hand -in- hand with the BSides chapter, with DEF CON being oriented toward social community and networking, and BSides being the most accessible educational annual event for tech newbies and seasoned professionals alike.
Already being a member of DEF CON and other hacker chapters in other regions, Victoria will collaborate with these professionals on establishing this new chapter.
Maternal Health & Reproductive Justice Work: The Perinatal World as a Transitional Space
Public Health Research
As a Regional Coordinator on a 3-year ECHO perinatal substance use research in collaboration with both Emory University and Morehouse School of Medicine, Victoria is currently working on the next set of publications, which will be published between now and 2027, as the project completes:
-Co-authoring a research paper on the Obstetric Violence and Affirming Care spectrum with Dr. H. Cooper of Emory University
-Co-authoring a research paper on the Impact of Relationships on Drug Recovery Treatment with Dr. T. Hollaway of Morehouse School of Medicine
-Developing a research paper on Criminal Justice Encounters and Perinatal Substance Use Healthcare Management within Jails and other Carceral Systems
-Developing a research paper about Understanding Perinatal Substance Use can evolve Crisis Response Teams
--Developing a research paper about navigating DFCS, and other Child Welfare Systems for Pregnant and Postpartum Women who Use Substances
-Developing a research paper about the unique experiences of Reproductive Loss and Institutional Responses to Grief within Perinatal Substance Use
-Developing a research paper focused on how Doulas could Support Pregnant and Postpartum Women who use Substances
Largely brought into the work for her history as a doula & childbirth educator, Court Appointed Special Advocate, crisis response instructor & coordinator, and law enforcement officer, the research papers will pull from those unique intersectional perspectives.
MSM Projects
Victoria is also actively pursuing funding for two main projects of her own design and development under Morehouse School of Medicine and will retain Primary or Co-Primary Investigator roles on each project in which funding is obtained. Each project is originating from her transitional intelligence framework on navigating crises phases and focusing on how affected communities within those crises may need to or can be better equipped to navigate those crises:
Project CROSSROADS: A 3-year statewide collaborative with (5) major regional sites (North Georgia, metro Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, and Savannah) coming together to review perinatal Intimate Partner Violence cases involving firearms. Modeled after maternal mortality review boards, the collaborative would bring together healthcare professionals, law enforcement agencies, emergency management, legal professionals, mental health professionals, domestic violence advocates, survivors, and others for the purpose of identifying and implementing intervention in each region.
Project PERINATAL CRISIS (Official Name TBD): This specialized crisis response team model, if funding is granted, would be developed under Morehouse School of Medicine as a 2-year implementation project in Albany, Georgia. Developing this idea under MSM also allows the university to continue the project forward with more funding and site replications for the model as TIC expands into additional national security and space-focused projects. This project is envisioned as Phase II of the First Responder Crisis Team Specialization Project, designed to further strengthen and equip regions with better suited crisis response teams and education.
This emerging model, designed by Victoria, integrates behavioral health, perinatal health expertise, emergency response, and crisis intervention to improve coordinated responses to maternal and perinatal crises while strengthening collaboration between healthcare and public safety systems. Perinatal crisis could be perinatal mental health (perinatal depression, perinatal psychosis, perinatal PTSD, perinatal anxiety, etc.), pregnancy or infant loss (miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, and fetal death diagnosis), or other maternal emergencies, inclusive of perinatal trauma events, such as perinatal intimate partner violence.
Victoria has already presented more information about this model to a number of universities while awaiting funding, including to medical doctors and clinical researchers at Emory University.
Reproductive Justice Work
Victoria is also working with Motherhood Beyond Bars, an organization that supports pregnant women in prison or jails via childbirth education programming, perinatal and substance use resources, and research. As the Regional Development Expansion Coordinator, Victoria will work as a liaison for their expansion and stabilization into several county jails within South Georgia. Victoria will be assisting with doula & educator workforce recruitment and development for the childbirth education programs, assessing each region in terms of strengths and gaps in resources for pregnant and postpartum women, and analyzing available carceral data in terms of learning more about how carceral systems could support pregnant and postpartum women within their care.
Also, as a certified death doula in addition to a certified full spectrum doula and childbirth educator, Victoria has often taught organizations, such as the Georgia Black Doula Network and Healthy Start chapters, on death in birthwork, inclusive of topics around grief, miscarriages, stillbirths, stillborns, and infant deaths.
Victoria has also been the statewide SASS instructor for 2 years, teaching free, grant-funded self-managed abortion and miscarriage management courses within the legal scope of state law, and connecting with a number of statewide, national, and international organizations in terms of advocacy, policy, and law.
Victoria also works with the national organization, Digital Defense Fund, to provide free digital security courses to reproductive justice organizations. She is also continuing her work in digital security within the perinatal space by studying the full Digital Security Ecosystem, from birth to death. This work will then inform how to best customize digital security classes for a number of organizations in multiple fields.
Mortality Systems & Grief: Death as a Transitional Space
Death Crisis Response Team & Unidentified Mortality Mapping & Tracking System
Death Crisis Response Teams are designed to strengthen multidisciplinary responses following sudden, traumatic, or complex deaths particularly in reference to suicides, homicides, overdose deaths, or pregnancy and infant loss.
Originally conceived as two separate projects under TIC, this model has evolved into envisioning an Identification & Mortality Specialist as part of the primary Team, which would create a four-person and optional five-person model version of the crisis response team.
The Identification & Mortality Specialist can carry out much of the work initially envisioned in the separate project for helping to identify unclaimed bodies via information gathering, forensic coordination, next-of-kin linkage, case tracking, and regional mortality data assessments.
Ultimately, this specialized crisis response team will be developed for regional purposes, but also designed to work alongside mass fatality response teams like the federal DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team) and the GBI’s GBRT (Georgia Body Recovery Team) when applicable.
This specialized crisis response team model, also developed by Victoria but also inspired by other models designed in other regions, will be further developed under phase IV of the Specialized First Responder Crisis Teams Project.
Both the Death Crisis Response Team and the Perinatal Crisis Response Team will continue to be developed and modeled in a way that they can naturally co-exist and collaborate with the traditional Mental Health Crisis Response Teams, which Victoria is also studying and working with under phase I of the project.
Preserving African-American History
Black funeral home directors were historically at the forefront of many Civil Rights movements by allowing many activists to hold secret meetings in their facilities. They were also appreciated for giving African-Americans elaborate homegoing services during times in which the rest of the world offered them little to no dignity in neither life nor death.
Victoria is currently conducting a plethora of interviews with African-American funeral home directors to preserve an oral archive of this significant part of history, particularly focusing on the funeral homes within the Deep South of the United States. This work will ultimately contribute to a larger project currently established by the Collective of Radical Death Studies.
Death Doula Program Initiatives
Victoria has been establishing an in-house volunteer bedside vigil hospice program in which death doulas and other death companions can be volunteer to sit, talk, read, and otherwise be present for those as they pass from this world. The particular community focus is on those in a rural community, covering several counties, who hardly have any visiting family during their last days.
After a number of years of providing monthly virtual free death lounges, she is also developing a series of free in-person sessions. Death Lounges are developed as a facilitated space for people to talk about death and grief in their life. There will also be an educational crisis and end-of-life planning session to close out the event and leave participants with tools to help navigate these life transitions further. These events will be structured as regional seasonal tours, and the work is ultimately designed to be taken over as the community resilience program branch of future established regional Death Crisis Response Teams.
Inspired by organizations such as the Humane Prison Project and with guidance from other prison hospice initiatives, Victoria has been designing an 80-hour peer hospice & death doula curriculum and certification program for prisoners on death row in the state of Georgia. This certification will allow other death row inmates to care for their peers as they approach end-of-life either medically or institutionally.
Victoria also teaches numerous individual classes around Death and Grief, inclusive of topics such as Suicides & Homicides, Autistic Death & Grief, Death & Grief in the African-American Community, Ancestral Reverence Traditions, Global Interfaith Death Traditions and Beliefs, the History of Halloween, Death and Grief in Folklore, Mythology, & Urban Legends, and End-of-Life Planning.
Autistic Advocacy: Neurodivergence as a Transitional Space
Research & Birthwork
Victoria has taught individual classes on supporting Autistic pregnant and postpartum women & other birthing people, which is also included in her 13-week doula certification program that she designed and taught for Mercer University’s Healthy Start staff for a number of years.
Victoria is also a member of an international group called Autistic Researchers Researching Autism (ARRA). This group exists as a collective of Autistic researchers all over the world sharing their historical, scientific, and politics theories on Autism, collaborating on research studies, and further advancing the understanding of Autism through a lens of lived experience.
Crisis Response
She has taught on supporting Autistic and ADHD communities in Crisis and has expanded her teachings into an 8-hour segment in the current Advanced Crisis Response certification that she is developing under TIC. This 8-hour course will include information about Autism, ADHD, and AuDHD, inclusive of traits and Autistic culture, Autistic grief and trauma, common co-occurring physical and mental conditions, and discussion of common crises for Autistics in various life transitions (pregnant and postpartum Autistics, Autistics in group homes and foster care, unhoused Autistics, and aging Autistics).
She is also currently solidifying partnerships to teach this 8-hour course as a standalone offering and certification.
Grief & Mortality Systems
Victoria has hosted Autistic Suicidal Ideation Support groups for international Autistic organizations, such as The Autastic Community.
She has also taught her Autistic Death and Grief course to mental health clinical professionals to better inform their work and support of the Autistic community.
She has presented virtually at the United Kingdom-based Pink Therapy Conference about supporting older Autistic individuals in palliative care who are also a part of the LGBTQ+ community.
On November 21st, 2025, Victoria was published as a lead chapter author, working in collaboration with a number of speech language pathologists, for work related to supporting the aging Autistic community in palliative care. The book is titled Speech-Language Pathology and Palliative Care, published via Routledge.
Creative Writing: The Arts as a Transitional Space
First Responder & Shadow Work Novel Series
Victoria is currently focusing on completing three of several planned novel series, titles TBD, within a creative production studio that she has established.
The first follows an Autistic cop who, though often isolated and mocked at her police department, begins to solely follow a pattern of disappearances and strange reappearances throughout the region to what is seemingly a sinister supernatural source.
This novel series will delve deeply into cop culture, workplace mobbing, the psychological concept and theory of shadow work, and various horror themes.
Ankou & Grief Novel Series
The second series will heavily center around the concept of the last person to die in a region becoming the new Ankou in the Afterlife, responsible for assisting other souls in their transition for the next year. Each book in the series will center around a certain form of death, with the first one focused on suicides.
The novel series has a strong gothic horror focus and explores themes of grief, death, social & familial culture and response around death and suicide, philosophy, and religious beliefs and global mythology pertaining to the Afterlife.
Mermaids & Reproductive Justice Novel Series
The third series is a futuristic dystopian novel series in which natural birth is illegal.
The themes are around human genetic engineering, philosophy, reproductive rights, healthcare, and familial and romantic relationships. The series will also heavily pull world mythology around mermaids and other water spirits, which are often heavily tied to birth themes due to birth and death often representing spiritual transitional states in addition to physical transitional states. This series will also be inspired by world history and amplify in fictitious form the real-world historical patterns of various women’s mental health being routinely targeted and questioned after complaints about real physical illnesses in their bodies, having conflicts with their partners, questioning societal rules, or speaking out against institutional injustice.
Nourishment & Spiritual Practices: Healing & Philosophy in Transitional Spaces
Religious Traditions & Spirituality
Drawing from an Interfaith ministerial and Philosophical scholar background, Victoria teaches and collaborates with clergy from Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Celtic Pagan, and African Traditional/Diasporic Traditions backgrounds in teaching classes, such as Global Death Traditions and Beliefs. This work also heavily informs her Ankou novel series that is currently in development.
She also engages in ongoing Biblical theology studies through the Lutheran Seminary and often attends Roman Catholic and Anglican monasteries for monastic prayer and vigil services led by the residing monks and nuns.
As part of a collective called Walking the Dikenga, she also was involved in helping to establish October annually as Hoodoo Heritage Month in 2019, which is now recognized and practiced by thousands ever since. This initiative, amplified by practitioners, researchers, artists, and clergy alike, has helped bring awareness to the practice as an established tradition and religion with recognized spiritual days, historical education, living elders recognition, ancestral reverence traditions, and helps combat ongoing misrepresentations and stigma of African-derived spiritual practices in America.
She also has presented a number of classes and lectures about a variety of other African Traditional Religions, such as Vodoun, Ifa, Santeria, Lucumi, and others.
Yoga & Meditation
Trained and certified in a number of yoga lineages, inclusive of Hatha, Kundalini, Yin, and Yoga Nidra by Indian yogis, Victoria has rigorously continued to study foundational texts such as The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, The Vedas, The Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Vita.
Currently certified as a 500-hour Multi-Style Yoga teacher and 200-hour Meditation teacher, her goal is to ultimately obtain her 1600-hour Yoga Therapist certification over the next few years.
She particularly works to bring yoga and meditation into marginalized and isolated communities, such as drug recovery treatment centers, nursing homes, foster care group homes, and juvenile unhoused shelters.
Herbalism
Victoria has studied herbalism through numerous organizations and currently holds an 800-hour Professional Clinical Herbalist certification via Heart of Herbs Institute while also currently completing an additional 1200-hour Herbal Immersion program via the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine.
Victoria also occasionally volunteers with other herbalists in the Fire Cider Brigade to create fire cider medicine to support the immune systems of the Unhoused population during seasonal transitions.
Victoria has also studied with K. Garza at the Steamy Chick Institute and received the Level 2 Peristeam Facilitator certification. She is continuing her studies to eventually obtain the Level 3 Peristeam Hydrotherapist certification. She continues to help educate the community, researchers, and clinicians about the worldwide cultural history of pelvic steaming with the goal of continuing the expansion of evidence-based research and implementation of the herbal practice in western medicine clinics and facilities.