Afro-American Studies Doctoral Candidate Karl Lyn Awarded Prestigious 2024 Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

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Karl Lyn, Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, has been named a recipient of the prestigious 2024 Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for his project, “Citizenship in the City: Black Political Culture, Community, and Possibility in South Central Los Angeles.” 

The Wenner-Gren Foundation funds doctoral research that advances anthropological knowledge, with the goal of supporting vibrant and significant work that furthers the understanding of what it means to be human. This grant will support Lyn’s ethnographic research in Los Angeles, where he will explore how Black residents formulate their political identities amid growing inequality and in a democracy that has not always proven accessible or effective for Black communities. His project expands beyond descriptions of what is lacking in urban neighborhoods to capture the ways residents have long created spaces and sources of sustenance that are embedded in their daily political practices.

Reflecting on his achievement, Lyn says, “I see getting the Wenner-Gren as an opportunity to push the boundaries of academic disciplinarity to engage with and create whatever knowledge is useful to build alternative conditions for a new world.”

Reviewers of Lyn’s project assessed the quality of research, its potential contributions to anthropological knowledge, and its capacity to provoke transformative dialogue in the field. Scholars who reviewed Lyn’s project shared the following:

“The project’s rethinking of apathy amidst emerging conditions of precarity is a crucial novel contribution of this work. By situating political life in the everyday, the project thinks with shifting demographics and housing displacements of a historically Black majority area over time to offer a needed perspective about how this generation of young adults attends to the political.”

“This study makes room for articulating sets of political actions that aren’t framed around agency in terms of reaction to hegemonic structures but rather makes room for the expansive everyday imagination of cultural projects that make life liveable amidst organized abandonment.” 

“By thinking with the question of ethnographic refusal as a key aspect of his research methodology and allowing participants to shape how they represent their political and cultural projects in a context that over-surveils young Black people, this project is methodologically and epistemologically significant.”

In addition to the Wenner-Gren Foundation's support, Lyn's research has garnered support from the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, American Psychological Association, and the National Council for Black Studies.