Katherine McKittrick is a Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University. Internationally recognized for her contributions to the fields of black studies, studies of liberation, and cultural geographies, she studies the creative contours of black livingness and diasporic placemaking.
McKittrick’s research focuses on how histories of racial displacement and loss have provided the conditions for black creatives and theorists to disrupt and remake spatial and scholarly norms. Her monograph Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle was one of the first texts to connect black studies, human geography, and the arts. Demonic Grounds set the stage for the vibrant and dynamic field of black geographies and was followed by multiple studies of black and black feminist geographies, now collected in Heartbreak and Other Geographies. An interdisciplinary scholar, McKittrick stiches together conventional academic forms and creative narratives as a way to challenge methodological norms, while also drawing attention to the complex layers of black imaginative texts, knowledges, and narrative-sonic forms. Her award-winning monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories delves deeply into how black liberation is undergirded by these stiches, layers, and places, and focuses on activities that tie freedom-making to cooperation and mutuality. McKittrick’s research portfolio is also guided by the writings of Jamaican theorist and creative Sylvia Wynter and is thus oriented toward a re-enchanted humanism. Her research and collaborations have led to the establishment of the Wynter-inspired working group, The Revolutionary Demand for Happiness, a collective of students, artists, designers, and writers who dream of and realize small scale placemaking projects and other creative adventures.
