Katherine McKittrick will present new work that highlights anti-colonial methodologies and addresses some of the limitations and possibilities of theorizing climate catastrophe and ecocide alongside race and racism. Working closely with Paul Gilroy, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, McKittrick’s thinking is propelled by their methodological clues that, as they unfold, unsettle analytical frames that tend to equate environmental toxicities with (degraded) blackness. Her talk will also center pedagogy and draw attention to how black livingness is not a concept, per se, but a set of actions that teach us how to theorize our environs anew.

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She researches in the area of black studies, anti-colonial studies, and critical creative methodologies. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006), edited Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015), and co-edited, with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007). Her most recent monograph Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) is an exploration of black methodologies. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Free and open to the public.