Monday, March 14, 2022
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Birkelund Board Room, 111 Thayer Street
Kimberley D. McKinson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and a trained cultural anthropologist. A native of Kingston, Jamaica, Kimberley received her B.A. in Cultural and Social Anthropology with a minor in Spanish from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Before joining John Jay College, Dr. McKinson was a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate at the University of Georgia.
Dr. McKinson's earlier ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the Dominican Republic. This work explored Dominican state and folk articulations of skin color as well as the ideologies of Dominicanidad and anti-Haitianismo. Dr. McKinson's current research and book project is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jamaica. This research is situated at the intersections of urban residential in/security, material culture, Caribbean slavery and postcoloniality, and critical black historiography. This project documents Kingston’s residential securityscape, with particular attention to the materiality and historicity of metal, and analyzes the ways in which the embodied, aesthetic, and infrastructural performance of security and insecurity in Kingston are shaped by long-standing narratives about the nation, race, class, discipline, and the home. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, the University of California Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design and several fellowships from the University of California, Irvine.