Krystal Strong

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Strong’s research and teaching combine anthropological approaches to formal and non-institutional educational processes, politics and activism, youth, new media technologies, and popular culture in Africa and the African Diaspora. Topically, she focuses on the politicization and cultural practices of youth, the ambivalent role of educational institutions in the social reproduction of power and privilege and as critical sites of political struggle, and the intersections of these processes across transnationally and digitally networked spaces. Dr. Strong’s primary objectives in this work are to elevate questions related to education and the experiences of young people in the disciplines of anthropology and Africana studies, to bring to the foreground more explicitly political questions within the field of education, and to integrate insights from African studies more fully into U.S. scholarship.   

Dr. Strong is working on multiple projects. She is revising her dissertation research into a book manuscript entitled Political Training Grounds: Students and the Future of Post-Military Nigeria, which is an ethnography of university student politics and activism after the transition to constitutional democracy in southwestern Nigeria. She recently initiated a new line of research, “Tracking A New Generation of Leaders,” which is a multinational qualitative project that explores the resurgent role of educational development in the production of a new political leadership class in Africa. Other research examines the roles of new and social medias in the cultural and political practices of youth in Africa and the African Diaspora. Finally, the “Mapping Student Protests” project is an early-stage data collection project that tracks the incidence and causes of protests and other forms of activism in African educational institutions.