She is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, examining representations of race, gender, and sexuality in popular media.

Dr. Joseph's first book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (2012), was published by Duke University Press.

In this book she investigates representations of Black multiracials in the media in the decade that preceded the election of President Barack Obama in 2008.

[8] Dr. Joseph teaches undergraduate and graduate courses including Communication Power and Difference and Black Cultural Studies, citing scholars such as Stuart Hall, Valerie Smith, Catherine Squires, and Jane Rhodes.

[10] In Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (2014), Joseph looks at disdain and apprehension in the nation, as well as positive affects and possibilities, of racial representation.

The stereotypes strip representations of Black-White mixed women from performing hybridity, or what Joseph calls multiracial Blackness.

[16] Born out of Black respectability politics, strategic ambiguity is not about explicitly recognizing racism and sexism but instead, only speaking back to systems of power in coded ways.

Expanding on the work of communication and cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall, Joseph introduces the notion of "equity" as inseparable from "difference".

[18] The research center has two main tenets of its scholarship: 1. humans negotiate difference through communication, 2. empowered systems, like the university, have a responsibility to wield the power it holds by advocating for equity.

The theory of difference that Dr. Joseph expands upon can be traced back to Ferdinand de Saussure who wrote that meaning comes from comparison and not inherent denotation of a named object.