Faculty and Staff

Maria Kromidas

Professor • Community and Social Justice Studies

Dr. Maria Kromidas is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Community and Social Justice Studies. Her work explores how race, schooling, and our very idea of human being can be rethought through the standpoint of childhood. Her book City Kids: Transforming Racial Baggage (Rutgers UP), based on intimate encounters with NYC kids, and her current research with NYC mothers, are concerned with how we come to live, learn, and encounter one another as racial beings. Her work is animated by the search for liberatory possibilities in everyday life, and is inspired by her dialogues with students about ways we can live together in ways that are more human.

Degrees

PhD Anthropology, Columbia University NY, NY

MA Anthropology & Education, Teachers College, Columbia University New York, NY

BA Biological Anthropology, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI

Specialization

critical race studies; childhood studies; ethnography of the US; social reproduction; schooling; subjectivity

Representative Publications


City Kids: Transforming Racial Baggage; New Brunswick NJ; Rutgers University Press; 2016
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/city-kids/9780813584782


Mothering and the racialised production of school and property value in New York City; , Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; Volume 54, 2022
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12780


"When I was a kid:" Childhood memories, care work, and becoming mom; , Subjectivity; 2021


"Agent of revolutionary thought:" Bambara and Black girlhood for a poetics of being and becoming human; , Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; Volume 11, 2019
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/732317


Toward the human, after the child of Man: Seeing the child differently in teacher education; Curriculum Inquiry; Volume 49, 2019
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/c6RMpefrBzJc2KcBtaAs/full?target=10.1080/03626784.2018.1549924

Awards and Honors

Faculty Excellence in Teaching
William Paterson University
05/01/2017

Notable Courses Taught

Childhood & Social Justice
Communities & Power: Introduction to Social Justice Studies
Senior Seminar in Anthropology
Research Methods in Anthropology
Anthropology of Inequality
Diversity & Equity in Schools

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