Where
I am Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Gender Studies and Black Studies units at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I research, write, and teach in the areas of black studies, cultural geographies, and the arts. I also study the writings of Sylvia Wynter. I am currently thinking and writing across three entwined registers: black methodologies, creative works, and practices of liberation; black and black feminist geographies; aesthetic traces that emerge alongside bookmaking, theory making, and cymatics. Each of these registers are complemented by and through solidarities and collaborations that bring into focus freedom-making, co-operation and diaspora.
Selected Writings
My writing includes the books, Demonic Grounds and Dear Science, as well as the edited collections, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis and, with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. My articles, essays, and other works attend to the gendered, racial and geographic processes that underwrite the plantation, the prison, music and music making, anti-colonial methods, and the unconventional artworlds of black creatives. Most of my essays can be accessed here and are also collected in Heartbreak and Other Geographies, edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne.
My favourite pieces to write have been: “Top Ten” for ArtForum and “Knocked Out” which can be found in Steve McQueen’s artbook, Bass.
Some Lockdown Conversations
During and after lockdown, I did a lot of interviews. Some of my favourites are:
Moriah and McKittrick in WSQ.
A conversation on Dear Science with all the cools, published in Society and Space.
Clarke and McKittrick for Dweller.
On Drexciya with Donna Honarpisheh.
Carby and McKittrick for Charis Books.
Barnes, Roudbari and McKittrick for MAS Context.
Drabinksi and McKittrick for the Black Studies Podcast.
Concertinas
For the last few years, I have researching books, bookmaking, bibliography studies, and the form and aesthetics of essays. I have been working with designer and photographer Cristian Ordóñez on a set of bookmaking projects that focus on tactility and anti-colonial narratives. Across these projects we have thought about how form, font, margins, binding, paper weight, and texture can remake or complement academic narratives by fusing the scholarly and the creative. At the same time, the project centres reading and reading practices; I have been speculating about when, if, how, why unconventionally designed scholarly essays, spacing and font decisions, textured pages, knitted spines, invite unexpected entryways into essays that focus on anti- colonialism. For this project, Concertinas, we have made the following box sets and books:
Katherine, Cristian, and Liz Ikiriko, Trick Not Telos (photo by Cristian Ordóñez)
Katherine, Cristian, Twenty Dreams (photo by Cristian Ordóñez)
Katherine, Cristian, A Smile Split by the Stars (photo by Darren Rigo)
Installation
In Spring 2025, a collective of artists, scholars, poets, curators, designers, creatives, and photographers launched A Smile Split by the Stars, an installation that worked with and through nourbeSe philip’s stunning poem, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheekbones.” Exhibited at Gallery 44 in Toronto, Canada, the A Smile Split by the Stars installation reproduced a large-scale vinyl version of philip’s poem, hundreds of 12” x 18” removeable posters that were printed with slivers and excerpts from the poem, two framed photo-slides from philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks archives, a continuous analogue slide show of selected archival papers from philip’s private collection, and a looped audio track of samples, one-shots, riffs, beats, and that were mashed up with five creatives reading “Meditations,” together and alone (nourbeSe philip, Trish Salah, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Chloe Savoie-Bernard, Otoniya J. Okot-Bitek). This exhibit also included a custom plinth upon which a handmade book, A Smile Split by the Stars, was exhibited; the book contained an essay by McKittrick and an index by Yaniya Lee and nourbeSe philip. In addition to the creatives noted just above and McKittrick and Lee, our collaborators were Nasrin Himada (co-curator of the installation), Cristian Ordenez, (designer of the book, the installation, and more), Sameen Mahboubi, (Gallery 44 curator of exhibitions), Muna Dahir (archivist and researcher), Aaliyah Strachan (workshop programming), Roya Del Sol (photographer). The installation also included the support of Alana Traficante, Darren Rigo, Simon Fuh, Gas Printing, Alison Postama, Kai Trotz-Motayne, Erica N. Carwell, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Modern Fuel, Toronto Image Works. The exhibit moves to Kingston, Ontario in autumn 2025. All photos below are by Darren Rigo.
Revolutionary Demand For Happiness
The Revolutionary Demand for Happiness is a working group of graduate students, faculty, and creatives who are interested in exploring the connections between cultural production and liberation. We share ideas about creative works, poetics, black studies, and anti-colonial studies; we seek out ways to momentarily concretize, in place, these ideas through small-scale aesthetic projects such as cooperative reading and writing projects, studio visits, book and art exhibits, music installations, and invited collaborations. You can check out who we are and some of our cool activities and findings at revolutionarydemandforhappiness.com.