Brown Bag Event February 21st 2018:
#TheyGunnedMeDown: Narrating Race-Radical Classrooms in the Movements for Black Lives
Dr. Carmen Kynard
The Full Slideshow can be found at: bit.ly/kynard-gc
Dr. Kynard is an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York (CUNY). She has a particular commitment to those places and programs that enroll large numbers of first-generation, working class students of color. Kynard has worked as the director of a first year writing program and as an English professor at St. John’s University, in the Department of Urban Education at Rutgers-Newark University, and in the Department of English at Medgar Evers College. She is a former high school teacher with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools and has led numerous projects focusing on issues of language, literacy, and learning: consultant for the Community Learning Centers Grant Project in Harlem, educational consultant and curriculum developer for the African Diaspora Institute/Caribbean Cultural Center of New York, instructional coordinator for the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, seminar leader for the New York City Writing Project, and seminar leader for Looking Both Ways.
Dr. Kynard has published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly, and many more. Her book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies won the 2015 James Britton Award and makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement.
Her work today sits at the crossroads of composition-rhetoric studies, new literacies studies, and urban education. Dr. Kynard is most interested in interrogating race and the politics of writing instruction in secondary and post-secondary settings and institutions, looking closely at the ways racialized political economies get expressed as literacy praxis. She strives to bring research, teaching, and service as a commitment to educational change where the humanities, writing studies, and critical pedagogy can work in conjunction. Her current research is on Black female college students’ literacies and learning as critical sites of recursive memory.
Email contact: ckynard@jjay.cuny.edu
Website: http://carmenkynard.org/
The City University of New York, including the Graduate Center, has more work to do, specifically in regards to de-centralizing whiteness on its faculty and in its curricula, supporting students, faculty, and staff of color, incorporating writing and research on black issues by black folk into our curricula and research, and by fighting the continued violences enacted on black folk through the field of psychology.
