Robin McGinty

Theatre Documentarian

Robin McGinty is a fourth-year Doctoral student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences PhD Program (Geography) at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to having received her BA from Antioch College, Robin holds a Master of Public Administration degree (MPA) from Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Robin McGinty has been awarded several fellowships, including Columbia University Center for Oral History Research Summer Institute (Fellow, 2017), CUNY Graduate Center/Dr. Louise Lennihan Arts and Sciences Grant (2016), Columbia University/Center for Justice (Justice Research Fellow, 2015) and Columbia Law School (The Public Science Project/Critical PAR Institute, 2014).
 

Robin McGinty’s research project “Carceral Knowledges: A Labor of Livingness” seeks to inspire a re-imagination of the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated and imprisoned African-American women’s knowledge production and practices through their oral histories as a method to interrogate the racialized and gendered spatial formations of historical ‘erasure’ and invisibility. Locating “Carceral Knowledges: A Labor of Livingness” as bound up in the black radical tradition and black feminist thought, the late Cedric Robinson’s notion of a ‘usable past’ provides an evocative template in which to theorize Robin McGinty’s research which intentionally centers formerly incarcerated black women and their political subjectivity. It is the untold stories embedded in a black liberatory struggle that can be viewed as the connective tissue to the practices of resistance to the prison and its afterlife which informs the navigation and negotiation of formerly incarcerated black women’s self-definition, as well as a personal and collective identity grounded in an ethos of sovereignty and self-determination. Robin McGinty’s research project can also be understood as an archive of memory and wisdoms intrinsic to the historic black freedom struggle in the United States—at core, it is what Saidya Hartman terms as the “making possibility out of dispossession” which both animates and gives meaning to “Carceral Knowledges: A Labor of Livingness.” 

Robin McGinty is presently an Adjunct Lecturer at CUNY Queens College’s Department of Urban Studies.