Professional Biography
Dr. Krystal Strong is an assistant professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division, a member of the Anthropology graduate group, and a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies, the Price Lab for the Digital Humanities, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Hub for Equity, Anti-Oppression, Research and Development (HEARD).
Dr. Strong’s research and teaching focus on student and community activism, the cultural and political power of youth, new media and popular culture, and the role of education as a site of political struggle with a geographic focus on Africa and the African Diaspora. She teaches courses in the Education, Culture, and Society and International Educational Development programs that focus on global youth cultures, ethnography and qualitative research methods, decolonizing education, and grassroots community activism. As a scholar and active organizer in the city of Philadelphia, her hometown, Dr. Strong brings a commitment to local communities and the lessons of activism to bear on her scholarship and pedagogy.
In 2017, Dr. Strong was awarded the Council on Anthropology and Education’s Presidential Early Career Fellowship. In 2020, she testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, on “The Youth Bulge in Africa: Considerations for U.S. Policy.” Her work has been published in Transforming Anthropology, Urban Education, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies. Her forthcoming book project, Apprentices to Power: Students and the Professionalization of Politics in Nigeria After Democracy is an ethnography of post-military university student politics and the trappings of leadership after Nigeria’s transition to democracy.
Dr. Strong is currently working on multiple research projects that utilize ethnographic, participatory, and multimodal methods to investigate the role of education in emergent struggles for political transformation in Africa, and to collaboratively document community-led cultural and political organizing work around educational justice and the displacement of Black communities in Philadelphia. Each of these projects incorporates elements of digital and public scholarship with the support of community partners, the digital scholarship team at Penn Libraries, and the Price Lab for the Digital Humanities.
