Krystal Strong, GSE assistant professor in the literacy, culture and international education division, has received a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to support the next 14 months of the project “Education and Political Change: Mapping Contemporary School Protests in Africa.” Dr. Strong’s research team will complete the first comprehensive, cross-national database of the incidence and causes of school-based protests in Africa since 2000 and will use interactive mapping technology to make this data publicly accessible to global researchers and practitioners.

Dr. Strong is also a member of the graduate group in anthropology, and a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies. Dr. Strong’s research and teaching combine anthropological approaches to formal and non-institutional educational processes, politics and activism, youth, new media technologies, and popular culture in Africa and the African Diaspora. Topically, she focuses on the politicization and cultural practices of youth, the ambivalent role of educational institutions in the social reproduction of power and privilege and as critical sites of political struggle, and the intersections of these processes across transnationally and digitally networked spaces.