Robyn Spencer
Faculty Fellow
Robyn Spencer is an Assistant Professor of US History at Lehman College in the Bronx, NY where she teaches survey and seminar courses on African American history, social protest and gender. Her research focuses on Black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She is completing a book on gender and organizational politics in the Oakland Black Panther Party with Duke University Press that will be published in 2016. Her writings have appeared in Souls, Journal of Women’s History and several edited collections.
Participating Years
2015–2016
Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence
Self-determination had a heady run in the 20th century, instanced by both revolutionary assertion and homogenizing mimicry. But what is autonomy now? What is dependence? How are these conditions of existence necessarily related – as contradictory rather than contrasting ideologies, representations, relations, outcomes? What forms reveal the dialectic at work? What forms disguise or displace the dynamic?
2011–2012
How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture
In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?