Kimberley D. McKinson

Assistant Professor

Specializations

I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts ethnographic research in Jamaica. My current book project examines security and insecurity in Jamaica considering how they are lived and remembered as well as how they become sedimented in and animated through an assemblage of cultural memory, discourse, infrastructure,  bodies and matter across the spatio-temporal breadth of the postcolonial landscape. My second research project is situated at the intersection of space colonization, Blackness, and Jamaican Maroon afro-futuristic imaginaries. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and the City University of New York.

I look forward to developing undergraduate and graduate courses on the cultures and politics of the Caribbean; race and ethnicity; urban ethnography; and infrastructure.

 As an undergraduate international student, I first became excited by the theoretical and methodological tools that anthropology gave me. Today, as a Black feminist anthropologist, I stand on the shoulders of intellectuals such as Zora Neale Hurston. I continue to be excited to use the spyglass of anthropology to see and question the world around me and to apply anthropological knowledge in service of creating a more just world. If anthropology is the study of what makes us human, then, I have always been inspired by my discipline's potential to rethink the terms of what it means to be human as well as radically imagine an equitable politics of humanity for our time.