UNC Sociology Welcomes Karida Brown As Visiting Assistant Professor

Karida Brown is a Visiting Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill for the 2017-18 academic year.  She comes to Carolina from Los Angeles, California where she is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2016, and a M.P.A. in Government Administration from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Her research focuses on race, social transformations, and communal memory. Her book, “Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia” (forthcoming with UNC Press), reconstructs the life histories of a cohort of African Americans who migrated throughout the Appalachian region during the African American Great Migration. This project stems from her dissertation, “Before they were Diamonds: The Intergenerational Migration of Kentucky’s Coal Camp Blacks”, which earned the 2017 Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association.

In 2013, Brown founded the Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project (EKAAMP) in partnership with the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) at UNC Chapel Hill. EKAAMP is a community-driven archival project aimed at documenting and preserving the history of the generations of African American coal mining families in her study. The mission of the EKAAMP project is to promote civic engagement through collaborative research. To that end, the EKAAMP archive has been commissioned for the exhibitions, featured on public radio, and incorporated into K-12 educational programs. The SHC was recently granted $877,000 by the Andrew Mellon Foundation to build out a model for this type of community-driven research. Brown is a co-Principle Investigator on this project. She will spend much of her time during her visit at Chapel Hill engaging with the academic community in the Department of Sociology, executing the project aims for the Mellon grant, and designing her next research project.