FULL CIRCLE: A RESEARCHER ENGAGES WITH HIS HOME COMMUNITY

Karl Lyn, Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, is currently engaged in community-based research in South Central Los Angeles exploring how Black young adults leverage their everyday interactions to envision and create alternative ways of organizing society. In particular, Lyn is studying how urban Black young adults create sites of belonging, political agency, and citizenship amid and despite growing inequality. 

Lyn attended under-resourced schools in neglected neighborhoods, envisioning possibilities for Black life both within and beyond schools. Yet, researchers studying Black young adults would have overlooked his vision since many of them limit their scope of research to suffering and coping with adversity. Looking to address what the literature thus far has ignored, Lyn has returned home to work with his community. 

Lyn’s work involves exploring alternatives to inequitable structures that limit Black life, such as racial capitalism, mass incarceration, and the racial wealth gap. While much of the scholarly literature focuses on “Black plight” and subjugation of Black life, Lyn’s research highlights how Black residents imagine and create alternatives to the existing systems of inequality.  

Lyn explained: “I try to intervene in this binary that only allows room for Black suffering or resistance to it, hoping to reveal how Black people envision and work toward a new way of living and being.” That is, rather than focusing on how Black young adults are resisting inequitable structures, he is interested in what kind of world they desire to create in its place. By talking to those most directly harmed by inequitable structures, Lyn gains a greater understanding of what kind of society can emerge in the wake of injustice. Through the ideas and efforts of this generational cohort of Black residents in Los Angeles, Lyn aims to reveal new and reimagined pathways toward justice, equity, and healing.  

"I try to intervene in this binary that only allows room for Black suffering or resistance to it, hoping to reveal how Black people envision and work toward a new way of living and being."

Lyn came into what he referred to as “social and political consciousness” during his formative middle and high school years in South Central Los Angeles, marked by the repeated closure of his schools. He recognized biases in the school curriculum given the major Eurocentric focus, and the lack of agency given to people of color if they were mentioned at all in class. Lyn pushed back against these modes of erasure in the curriculum by dedicating his academic life to learning about Black life and history. Lyn wanted to expand his knowledge, but the cost of higher education proved challenging. With the support of the Posse Foundation, however, Lyn attended Dickinson College, studying Africana Studies & Education.  

Thinking that the field of education was where he could have the greatest impact, Lyn went on to study Higher Education in a master’s program here at UMass. He wanted to examine the limits and possibilities of education as a tool for advancing equity and justice, and correct both misinformation and lack of information about Black educational experiences.  

While Lyn spent time addressing issues surrounding educational access within the Black community, he learned that education was only one area out of the many facets of society that have relegated Black people to the bottom of a social hierarchy. Lyn says: “it was important for me to understand the multiple and overarching systems that limit Black people's life chances.” He wanted to address issues surrounding educational access from a new perspective, leading him to pivot from Higher Education to Afro-American Studies to work more directly with these issues, and he had help from a resident pioneer in the field. 

Lyn credits the late Professor John H. Bracey, Jr. for bringing him into the fold of Black Studies. It was Professor Bracey who introduced Lyn to the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, and whom Lyn describes as being “such a powerhouse” in the study of Black life and the world not just as it is, but as it might otherwise be. Professor Bracey introduced Lyn to the National Council for Black Studies, and brought him to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.  

After Professor Bracey introduced Lyn to the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, he was accepted into the Ph.D. program, continuing his intellectual thinking beyond just the study of problems, but the study of what is possible. By centering Black life, Lyn was immersed in exploring new ways of living and securing a different future for those relegated to the margins of society.  

Lyn explained his transition from a Master’s in Higher Education to a Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies, saying: “I learned that education was only one area out of the many facets of society that have relegated Black people to the bottom of a social hierarchy. It was important for me to understand the multiple and overarching systems that limit Black people's life chances.”  

Lyn said he studied and critiqued the systems and practices of society’s racial hierarchy “in order to discover opportunities to upend such systems and reimagine what a new social and political order might look like through the ideas and aspirations of those who have been assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy.” As a result, Lyn said his focus on Afro-American Studies became a way to “gain and produce knowledge that would be of use to communities struggling for a better world.” 

Lyn uses historical and ethnographic methods in his community-based research. The historical methods involve Lyn searching through archives for the political history of Black Los Angeles. He is particularly interested in how Black residents in Los Angeles have understood and navigated their conditions from when California became a U.S. state in 1850 to the late 20th century. These historical accounts contextualize the ethnographic data Lyn gathers. 

Ethnographic methods place the researcher directly in the environment they study. For Lyn, this means conducting interviews with 18-25 year old Black residents living in South Central Los Angeles. Lyn is particularly interested in broadening understanding of what constitutes politics, who participates, and where it occurs, opening possibilities to understand and support less visible forms of Black political activity.  

These methods have led to findings that are often overlooked in scholarly literature. For example, Lyn shares one story of there being plans to build a men’s jail in a particular area of South Central Los Angeles, but Black and Brown community members organized against the construction plan. Winning that fight, they created a community garden in that same area slotted for the jail. Lyn says “at that community garden they are now cultivating fruits and vegetables as a form of self-reliance, and healing for the community. This community garden is a form of mutual aid rather than relying on some of the capitalist structures that have exploited them in that area.” 

Lyn’s research has led to intriguing ideas that he says continue to guide his work. For example, he is interested in what collaborative care might look like when a community has the capacity to develop and share their own essential resources. Lyn wonders how values of self-determination and collective responsibility can produce a way of living that sustains Black life in uncertain times, and how such values can reshape civil society to move beyond capitalist exploitation. Lyn hopes his project can serve as a model for understanding how Black communities remake and unmake their environments according to their desired futures. Lyn asks “what future are they seeking? How is that future radically different from the current social order? What does that future require of us now?” 

While these possibilities keep him excited about his research, Lyn remains humble. He grapples with the social and political context of his educational trajectory, as a scholar in the same educational systems that are implicit in depriving the Black communities he studies. “What does that mean as someone who has benefited from this higher education system?” he asks. As such, Lyn says he must be transparent with community members that his commitment is not to any institution, but to the project of centering and supporting their voices, needs, and most ambitious dreams for society.  

Lyn’s work is funded by a Ford Foundation predoctoral fellowship, a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, a Wenner-Gren Dissertation fieldwork grant, and a UMass Graduate School Fieldwork Grant. He was also the winner of UMass’s Three Minute Thesis competition in 2019.  

Written by Lance Piantaggini, PhD student in Education, as part of the Graduate School's Public Writing Fellows Program.