Katherine McKittrick

Last updated
Katherine McKittrick
Born1970 (age 5354)
Ontario, Canada
Education York University (Ph.D.)
Occupations
  • Professor
  • academic
  • writer
  • editor
Known forGender studies, diaspora studies, black studies

Katherine McKittrick is a Canadian professor and academic, writer, and editor. She is a professor in Gender studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art). [1] [2] While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis on embodied, creative and intellectual spaces engendered in the diaspora. [3]

Contents

Biography

McKittrick has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University; she received her degree in 2004. [4] She is a fellow of Royal Society of Canada (College) and a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Since 2005, she has been Professor in Gender studies at Queen's University, with joint appointments in Cultural Studies and Geography. She is former Editor at Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. [5]

Academic work

McKittrick’s work focuses on black feminist thought, cultural geography, black studies, anti-colonial studies, and the arts. McKittrick's writing centers black life—as empirical, experiential, spatial, and analytical processes—while also drawing attention to how black creative texts are expressive of anti-colonial politics. These themes are addressed in her books Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006). [6] and Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) as well as her edited collection and contributions to the book Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2013). [7] McKittrick also edited, with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007). [8] Her research explores the works of Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, Jimi Hendrix, Drexciya, Édouard Glissant, and Dionne Brand.

Publications

Books

Edited volumes

Articles

Book chapters

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human geography</span> Study of cultures, communities, and activities of peoples of the world

Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography which studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment, examples of which include urban sprawl and urban redevelopment. It analyzes spatial interdependencies between social interactions and the environment through qualitative and quantitative methods.This multidisciplinary approach draws from sociology, anthropology, economics, and environmental science, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the intricate connections that shape lived spaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dionne Brand</span> Canadian writer (born 1953)

Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012 and first Black Poet Laureate. She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017 and has won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers' Prize, and the Toronto Book Award. Brand currently resides in Toronto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black studies</span> Academic field focusing on peoples of the African diaspora and Africa

Black studies or Africana studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field that primarily focuses on the study of the history, culture, and politics of the peoples of the African diaspora and Africa. The field includes scholars of African-American, Afro-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, Afro-European, Afro-Asian, African Australian, and African literature, history, politics, and religion as well as those from disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, education, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The field also uses various types of research methods.

Feminist geography is a sub-discipline of human geography that applies the theories, methods, and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society, and geographical space. Feminist geography emerged in the 1970s, when members of the women's movement called on academia to include women as both producers and subjects of academic work. Feminist geographers aim to incorporate positions of race, class, ability, and sexuality into the study of geography. The discipline was a target for the hoaxes of the grievance studies affair.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shebeen</span> A bar or pub, originally an illegal drinking establishment

A shebeen was originally an illicit bar or club where accessible alcoholic beverages were sold without a license. The term has spread far from its origins in Ireland, to Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe, the English-speaking Caribbean, Namibia, Malawi, and South Africa. In modern South Africa, many shebeens are now fully legal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Gilroy</span> British historian (born 1956)

Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London (UCL). Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies".

Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought.

Critical geography is theoretically informed geographical scholarship that promotes social justice, liberation, and leftist politics. Critical geography is also used as an umbrella term for Marxist, feminist, postmodern, poststructural, queer, left-wing, and activist geography.

E. Patrick Johnson is the dean of the Northwestern University School of Communication. He is the Annenberg University Professor of Performance Studies and professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University. Johnson is the founding director of the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern. His scholarly and artistic contributions focus on performance studies, African-American studies and women, gender and sexuality studies.

Boom Shaka was a pioneering South African kwaito music group consisting of Junior Sokhela, Lebo Mathosa, Theo Nhlengethwa and Thembi Seete. They released their first single "It's About Time" in 1993, and subsequently released their debut LP, titled "Kwere Kwere" in 1994. Boom Shaka was one of the most successful bands of the mid-1990s in South Africa. Their music was the soundtrack for many young people in the newly democratic South Africa. The group was viewed as representing "the hopes and dreams of a people after liberation". Boom Shaka also achieved international success in London, among other places.

Sylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man". Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.

<i>Antipode</i> (journal) Academic journal

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published five times per year by Wiley-Blackwell and produced by The Antipode Foundation. Its coverage centers on critical human geography and it seeks to encourage radical spatial theorizations based on Marxist, socialist, anarchist, anti-racist, anticolonial, feminist, queer, trans*, green, and postcolonial thought. Originally inspired by the social justice movements of the 1960s, the journal supports progressive causes through the work of the Antipode Foundation, a UK registered charity. Antipode is also known for its online "Interventions", its book series, and its diverse workshops and lectures. The chief co-editors are Sharad Chari, Tariq Jazeel, Katherine McKittrick, Jenny Pickerill and Nik Theodore.

Cindi Katz, a geographer, is Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and everyday life, research on children's geographies, her intervention on "minor theory", and the notion of counter-topography, which is a means of recognizing the historical and geographical specificities of particular places while inferring their analytic connections to specific material social practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tina Campt</span> Academic noted for work on Afro-Germans

Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Campt previously held faculty positions as Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities at Brown University, Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women's Studies at Barnard College, Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Campt is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich, Image Matters: Archive Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, Listening to Images, and A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See.

The coloniality of power is a concept interrelating the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge, advanced in postcolonial studies, decoloniality, and Latin American subaltern studies, most prominently by Anibal Quijano. It identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.

Richa Nagar is a scholar, creative writer, educator, and theatre-worker who is Professor of the College in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Nagar's creative and scholarly work makes multi-lingual and multi-genre contributions to transnational feminism, social geography, critical development studies, and critical ethnography. Her research has encompassed a range of topics including: politics of space, identity and community among communities of South Asian origin in Tanzania; questions of empowerment in relation to grass-roots struggles in the global South, principally with the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Sitapur District, India; the politics of language and social fracturing in the context of development and neo-liberal globalization; and creative praxis that uses collaboration, co-authorship, and translation to blur the borders between academic, activist, and artistic labor. She has held residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford in 2005–2006, at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS) at New Delhi in 2011–2012, and at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in 2013. She was named Honorary Professor at the Unit for Humanities at the Rhodes University (UHURU) at Rhodes University in South Africa in 2017, and her work has been translated into several languages including Turkish, Marathi, Italian, German and Mandarin.

Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.

Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World is an unpublished manuscript written by Sylvia Wynter. The work is a seminal piece in Black Studies and uses diverse fields to explain Black experiences and presence in the Americas.

Embodiment theory speaks to the ways that experiences are enlivened, materialized, and situated in the world through the body. Embodiment is a relatively amorphous and dynamic conceptual framework in anthropological research that emphasizes possibility and process as opposed to definitive typologies. Margaret Lock identifies the late 1970s as the point in the social sciences where we see a new attentiveness to bodily representation and begin a theoretical shift towards developing an ‘Anthropology of the Body.’

References

  1. Hudson, Peter (2014). "Canada and the Question of Black Geographies: An Interview with Katherine McKittrick". The CLR James Journal. 20 (1): 233–240. doi:10.5840/clrjames201492215.
  2. Cresswell, Tim (2013). Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. West-Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 271–272–274. ISBN   978-1-40516940-0.
  3. Mohanty, Chandra; Jacqui Alexander (2010). Transnational Feminist Praxis. USA: State University of New York. pp. 23–44. ISBN   978-1-4384-2938-0.
  4. "York University Alumni- Completed PhD Dissertations" . Retrieved 12 August 2013.
  5. Andy, Kent. "Meet Antipode's New Editorial Collective". The Antipode Foundation. Retrieved 12 August 2013.
  6. "Demonic Grounds". University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved 2021-02-05.
  7. McKittrick, Katherine, ed. (2015-01-01). Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. doi:10.1215/9780822375852. ISBN   978-0-8223-5820-6.
  8. "Black Geographies and the Politics of Place". btlbooks.com. Retrieved 2021-02-05.