Dr. Krystal Strong is an assistant professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division, holds a secondary appointment in Africana Studies, is a member of the Anthropology and Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies graduate groups, and is a faculty affiliate of 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 2020, Dr. Strong 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, and is forthcoming in Current Issues in Comparative Education and Journal of Modern African Studies. Her forthcoming book project, Apprentices to Power: Students and the Anti-Radicalism of Leadership 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 has received a number of awards, including the 2021 Penn GSE Faculty Recognition of Outstanding Service to Students, the 2018 Penn GSE Student Government Commendation for Excellence in Service to Colleagues and Students, as well as the 2017-2018 American Anthropological Association Council on Anthropology of Education Concha Delgado Gaítan Early Career Presidential award.

Research Interests and Current Projects

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. She is also working 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.

Activism Beyond the Classroom
A course and digital platform co-designed with Penn students and Philadelphia community activists, Activism Beyond the Classroom engages in participatory inquiry and public scholarship related to grassroots activism around education and social justice. The course features public writings and curricula, a mixtape, and a class podcast.

African Youth Leadership Study
A multinational qualitative study and mapping project which investigates the global proliferation of educational initiatives that have targeted African youth for leadership development over the past decade. This study examines the growing relationship between educational development and the formation of a new leadership class in Africa.

School Protests in Africa
A mixed methods study to track the incidence and causes of school-based protests in Africa since 2000, with support from the Spencer Foundation to make the database and map publicly accessible online.

Re/Member Black Philadelphia
A multimodal digital storytelling and community archiving project which investigates processes of displacement and community resistance in the city of Philadelphia. It utilizes ethnography, oral history, mapping, filmmaking, archiving, and 3D technologies.

The Move Activist Archive
A community archiving project to digitally preserve the organizational history and collective memory of The MOVE Organization, in partnership with MOVE and with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Publications

Selected Publications

Strong, K., & Kelly, C. K. (In Press). Youth leadership for development: Contradictions of Africa’s growing leadership pipeline. Journal of Modern African Studies.

Strong, K., Nafziger, R.N., Sanyaolu, J., & Aye, B. (2022). From #EndSARS to Pan-African Solidarity: Building an Intergenerational and Transnational Movement Against State Violence. The Forge: Organizing Strategy and Practice.

Strong, K., & Nafziger, R. N. (2021). Education for Black liberation: Freire and past/present Pan-African experiments. Current Issues in Comparative Education. 23 (2): 39-54.

Strong, K. (2021). A requiem for Delisha and Tree Africa. Anthropology News. September/October 2021.

Strong, K. (2021). #EndSARS: le mouvement contre les violences policières au Nigeria. Bulletin FrancoPaix, 6 (4): 1–6.

Strong, K. (2020). Love for my people: Some reflections on Sheila Walker and life-affirming anthropology. Transforming Anthropology. 28(2).

Nafziger, R. N., & Strong, K. (2020). Revolutionary vanguard no more? The student movement and the struggle for education and social justice in Nigeria. In A. Choudry & S. Vally (Eds.), The university and social justice: Struggles across the globe. Pluto Press.

Royston, R. & Strong, K. (2019). Re-territorializing Twitter: African moments 2010–2015. In A. De Kosnick, & K. P. Feldman (Eds.), #Identity: Hashtagging, race, gender, sex, and nation.University of Michigan Press.

Strong, K. (2018). Do African lives matter to Black Lives Matter? On youth uprisings and the borders of solidarity. Urban Education, 53(2), 265–285.

Strong, K. (2016). Practice for the future: The aspirational politics of Nigerian students. In A. Stambach, & K. Hall (Eds.), Student futures, aspirations, and political participation: Comparative anthropological perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan.

Strong, K., & Ossei-Owusu, S. (2014). Naija boy remix: Afroexploitation and the new media creative economies of cosmopolitan African youth. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 26(2), 189–205. doi: 10.1080/13696815.2013.861343.

Courses

Activism Beyond the Classroom
Decolonizing Education
Ethnographic Research Methods
Qualitative Modes of Inquiry
Vanguard or Vandals? The Politics of Youth in Africa
Youth Cultural Formations

News & Media

Penn GSE News

Why did #EndSARS go global this fall?

Krystal Strong examines a youth-led protest movement trying to end police brutality in Nigeria.

November 2, 2020

Krystal Strong urges US House subcommittee to support leadership initiatives for African youth

Strong said African students are “learning what it means to be a citizen, developing political identities, and learning the extent to which their governments and societies will support them.”

February 17, 2020

In the Media

Penn students and staff rally to help preserve affordable housing for West Philadelphia residents

Krystal Strong protested on campus with students and faculty and members of the surrounding community to stop the sale of subsidized rental units and the displacement of Black and poor Philadelphians in University City.

The Philadelphia Inquirer | December 14, 2021

Murals honoring Black activists now wrap the Municipal Services Building

Krystal Strong is featured in one of the two new murals along the sides of the Municipal Services Building, across from Philadelphia’s City Hall. They honor Black activists of the past year, as well as the past several decades.

WHYY | May 11, 2021

Relief, calm, and a sense that ‘justice was served’ as Philadelphia watches Chauvin’s guilty verdict

Krystal Strong is quoted on justice that was not obtained in the verdict of the George Floyd murder trial.

Philadelphia Inquirer | April 20, 2021

Calls to ‘defund the police’ intensify after Philadelphia police killing of Walter Wallace Jr.

Krystal Strong said that the reckoning this past summer over police brutality and racial injustice, combined with Walter Wallace Jr.’s death last week, have catapulted the conversation about defunding police from radical to mainstream. Before May, she never imagined “we would be having a national conversation about defunding the police.” She added, “People are being compelled to rethink their ideas, because the things that they thought could work are clearly not.”

Philadelphia Inquirer | November 2, 2020

One week in the life of Philadelphia: A death, protests, the pandemic and election mayhem

Krystal Strong, an organizer of Black Lives Matter, told a crowd in Malcolm X Park: “We’re watching the way how Walter Wallace Jr. is becoming a symbol,” she said, “and we’re losing sight of how this was a human being.”

The Washington Post | November 1, 2020

How viral police shooting videos can mess with your mental health

Krystal Strong notes that viewing videos of police violence is more likely to trigger severe responses among Black and Brown Americans and chooses not to view or share such images anymore, but said that she and other activists grapple with the question, noting that it was evident the powerful video imagery after Walter Wallace, Jr. was killed was galvanizing during the protests in West Philadelphia.

Billy Penn | October 28, 2020

’The protesters had to deescalate the police’: Demonstrators are the ones defusing violence at protests

Krystal Strong said, “The continuity across these spaces, the cruelty, the egregious militarized force, it forces you to come to the conclusion that this is systemic,” recalling watching a young black man get rammed with a police bike at a recent demonstration. “It’s not just Minneapolis. It’s not just Chicago or LA.”

Vox | June 12, 2020

George Floyd protests bring new organizers to protests in Philadelphia

Krystal Strong, a member of BLM Philly and a longtime activist in the city, said most protests in the city were orchestrated by groups well-versed in community organizing, such as her organization. She welcomes the new faces.

The Wall Street Journal | June 9, 2020

Preserving Family Histories with digital technology in West Philadelphia

Krystal Strong describes the Re/member Black Philadelphia project, a community archiving project which utilizes digital media and technology to document and celebrate the rich experiences, institutions, spaces, and cultures of Black people in the city.

6 ABC | January 17, 2020

Awards & Honors

Krystal Strong received a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation that will fund the collection of MOVE histories, their political work, and their fight against state targeting. The counter-archive will culminate in a pop-up multimodal exhibit that will assemble the oral histories and artifacts through immersive technologies to create a layered understanding of the role of MOVE in the Black freedom struggle. Read more about the archive in Conversations: A Blog of the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

Posted on March 18, 2021

Krystal Strong has been named a 2020-2021 Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow by the Penn Price Lab for the Digital Humanities, a lab that supports innovative uses of technology in the study of history, art, and culture.

Posted on November 30, 2020

Krystal Strong has received a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to support the next 14 months of the project "Education and Political Change: Mapping Contemporary School Protests in Africa." Dr. Strong's research team will complete the first comprehensive, cross-national database of the incidence and causes of school-based protests in Africa since 2000, and will use interactive mapping technology to make this data publicly accessible to global researchers and practitioners.

Posted on September 21, 2018