Kyrie Mason

Kyrie Mason is a PhD student in Brown’s Africana Studies department. Throughout their academic career, their intellectual interests have centered around two basic questions: “What is this thing and how does it work?” Because those questions are broad, Kyrie’s educational journey includes a B.A in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a focus on Race, Gender and Class while their M.A training is in History, with a specialization in Public and African history. In particular, their masters training had them thinking through how historiography is not only an academic concern, but intimately tied up in self, public and national formation(s). This line of questioning has continued and grown into their PhD research. Here at Brown, their work engages those questions through the rhetorical and conceptual structure of youth across disparate Black socio-political movements, with specific attention paid to how that structure is materially and practically engaged not only by these movements but by a range of institutional interests and policy initiatives. By providing this schematic, Kyrie hopes to enable more precise interventions in how we engage and empower Black youth, especially in regards to our parenting, educational and extracurricular programming and policy-setting.