VIRTUAL EVENT: Katherine McKittrick - Dear Science and Other Stories book celebration

In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness.

Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

Join us for this book celebration, featuring a presentation from Katherine McKittrick, responses from Xine Yao and Luke de Noronha, and discussion.

Speakers

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen's University, Canada, editor of Sylvia Wynter: On Being as Human Praxis (Duke University Press, 2015), and author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at UCL English. Her book Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America is forthcoming with Duke University Press in Autumn 2021.

Luke de Noronha is Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre (UCL) and author of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (Manchester University Press, 2020).

The Book

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021).

Available from: https://www.dukeupress.edu/dear-science-and-other-stories

Hosted by

The Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at UCL provides a focal point for scholarship, teaching and public engagement activities that are addressed to various problems of racial inequality and hierarchy. The Centre is committed to the production of new, historically-informed, critical knowledge addressed to some of the most urgent social and political questions of our time.

UCL Geography is a world-leading centre for teaching, research and public engagement. Our lecturers address many urgent concerns facing the world today, including climate change, urban development, migration, environmental management and geopolitics. This event is part of the department's Human Geography Seminar Series.

With many thanks to Duke University Press for supporting this event.

This event will take place on Zoom. Please sign up via Eventbrite and you'll receive an email with the Zoom link before the event.

All welcome.  Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need assistance on the day, and follow this FAQ link for more information and to read our virtual events code of conduct. All of our events are free, but you can support the IAS here.