For 30 years years now, I have worked in and with culturally and linguistically pluralistic, urban settings, in and out of schools, from K-16. As an interdisciplinary researcher and scholar, I am especially interested in the ways that race, gender, Black language/cultures, Black feminisms, and the politics of schooling collide. I work at the intersection of a few, interrelated disciplines and fields: rhetoric-composition studies, literacies research, Black feminist/gender studies, and critically raced theories of teaching and learning.  Today, the content and political-methodologies of my manuscripts, journal articles, keynote addresses, conference presentations, grants, workshops, and community work involve a close following of four, overlapping cyclical themes.

In this theme, I look at the polemics of and research on Black Language (BL) as representative of a unique political and cultural context. I look at Black Language philosophically as a space that offers radical alternatives of life, freedom, and racial critique. This work first began with book chapters that I published in 2003.  Those texts launched journal articles in English Teaching: Practice and Critique, Computers and Composition, and Teaching English at the Two Year College as well as book chapters published by Teachers College Press and Heinemann. Overall, this body of work links the racial subordination of BIPOC communities with the ways that their multimodality, multilingual literacies, and ethnic rhetorics have been denigrated.  For access to my research and pedagogies related to this theme, click here.

My pedagogical focus on Black Language is now most closely related to the digital projects that I engage with undergraduate students, projects that I design from the vantage points of AfroDigital Humanities, Black feminisms, and Digital Blackness. In these projects, Black Language is not merely a product or set of morphosyntactic choices from speakers and writers but an ideological system and intellectual approach.  For links to these projects, click here.

In this area of my work, I examine discourses of Black girls, Black women, and gender-expansive folx as histories and epistemologies that can (re)shape research, schools, and methodologies.  This theme is closely connected to the work that I do in discourse and composition-rhetoric studies but it is distinct in that it is explicitly connected to contemporary Black feminist purposes, methods, and processes. This is the theme where I am expending most of my energy with a new book manuscript.  In this monograph, I am looking at how college undergraduate women/femmes/GNC folx of African descent construct themselves as mothers, daughters, social activists, and literate beings in the struggle for their own right to flow past barriers and reconstitute themselves in higher education.

A collaborative article in Changing English looks at women hip hop deejays and the ways that gender, sexuality, and narrative identities shape their technological experiences and artistry in the industry. Across the broader stretch of this theme, I have published journal articles in Teaching Education, Enculturation, and Harvard Educational Review, and chapters in edited collections. For access to my research and pedagogies related to this theme, click here. Black Feminist praxis shapes both how and why I teach undergraduate and graduate courses and explicitly direct work gender studies departments today with an unyielding focus on intersectionality.   For links to these projects, click here.

In this theme, I make an explicit connection to pedagogy and race through an intersectional lens. In particular, I am interested in the ways that the histories of Black education in the context of overlapping race-gender-sexuality oppression bear implicit connections to theories of critical pedagogies and radical approaches to understanding and teaching literacies. In this theme, I have published in College Composition and Communication, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Changing English and chapters in edited collections. I also explore this theme most critically with and at my open access website/blog that I launched in fall of 2012, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (http://carmenkynard.org), which has now received more than 2 million hits.  For access to my research and pedagogies related to this theme, click here. All of the projects in this theme of my work converge around my interests in thinking about and providing an alternative center of gravity for a critical university education where the experiences of Brown and Black bodies are centered. For links to these projects, click here.

Here, I situate Black cultural spheres and aesthetic movements as histories of literate traditions. My first book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies, argues that the Black Freedom Struggles of the 1960s and 1970s set particular discursive and political imaginations in motion for composition studies when the dynamics of Black radicalism achieved a “re-vocabularization” of literacy and academic discourse. Related to this theme, I have published journal articles in College Composition and Communication, Reading Research Quarterly, College English, and Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education.For access to my research and pedagogies related to this theme, click here.