https://www.kristanmccullum.com/home daily 1.0 2021-12-14 https://www.kristanmccullum.com/about daily 0.75 2023-04-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634607549337-ROGRXI1W51R3KEIHYO16/IMG-0398.jpg About - Biography — I am an oral historian and interdisciplinary scholar whose research is situated within the strands of 20th century cultural and social history with an emphasis on race, space, place, and memory in the U.S. South. My approach to scholarship and teaching is undergirded by Black studies and Black geographies. I earned my Ph.D. in the Social Foundations of Education from the University of Virginia (UVA) in spring 2023. I currently serve as assistant project director of The Eastside Project, an oral history project based in Cleveland, Mississippi, that documents the long history of a historically Black school in the Mississippi Delta. I also work as a senior researcher with the Teachers in the Movement (TIM) oral history project and the Center for Race and Public Education in the South (CRPES), both at UVA. Prior to pursuing my doctorate, I spent five years in the Mississippi Delta teaching and working in K-12 public education—I tell people that part of my soul is down in the Delta. I earned my M.A. from Columbia University’s Teachers College in 2015 and my B.S. from the University of Kentucky in 2011. I used to consider my path to academia to be a nontraditional route (with lots of unrelated bits), but the truth is that each of my lived experiences has shaped me as a scholar. I was born and raised in southeastern Kentucky in the heart of the Central Appalachian coalfields, and the mountains will always be home. https://www.kristanmccullum.com/general-1 daily 0.75 2021-10-19 https://www.kristanmccullum.com/publications-media daily 0.75 2023-09-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/187c2fdb-90a3-40d1-934b-4c22a42cd9eb/Screen+Shot+2021-03-04+at+10.51.33+AM.png Publications and Media https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634738748308-08TLD3S0V4J0296W4QT0/IMG-1840.JPG Publications and Media https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634738690625-DAQM54ZT4D1I3RFMMBV7/74216707_916797745386845_4847119181948125184_o.jpg Publications and Media https://www.kristanmccullum.com/community-history daily 0.75 2022-10-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634652370910-3C97LB6CNU4RAPRHM22I/IMG-2354.JPG Community History https://www.kristanmccullum.com/teaching daily 0.75 2022-10-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634647361594-FJBZLMHLKUZG9Z5D8CPC/IMG-1994.JPG Teaching - Courses taught at the University of Virginia: EDLF 4610: Civil Rights Movement and Education EDLF 3240: Education in Multicultural Societies EDLF 3470: Hip Hop, History, and Education (teaching assistant) Courses taught at the University of New Orleans: EDCI 4620 Curriculum and Instruction for Multicultural Education https://www.kristanmccullum.com/pagecv daily 0.75 2023-04-24 https://www.kristanmccullum.com/research daily 0.75 2023-09-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634661419465-XFNCVPDP8BJRCZNJKE6L/DunhamHigh1.jpg Research - Research My research is situated within the nexus of 20th century cultural and social history with an emphasis on race, education, community, and memory in the rural U.S. South. I seek out the counter-narratives—not so much to revise as to provide alternative histories that have been neglected or erased within the dominant historical narrative. I am interested in people’s histories as told from their perspectives, which means I prioritize oral history in my work. Specifically, I use oral history to reconstruct spaces and their interiority (both physically and culturally) within a particular place during a particular historical moment. My work is undergirded by the tenet that oral history as a methodology is instrumental to not only the historical narratives themselves but to the historic preservation efforts of physical sites and structures. Dissertation Project My dissertation, “Blues Hollers: A Pedagogy of Space and the Scale of Black Freedom in Kentucky Appalachia,” is a critical reinterpretation of Appalachian history that confronts the mythology of Black invisibility by illuminating a regional history that is neither lost or hidden—it has always existed.* It uses both oral history and ethnographic methods to examine the experiences of Black Appalachians who came of age in the southeastern Kentucky coalfields during the civil rights movement. Specifically, I explore the ways in which they navigated various educative spaces in the coal camp in the pursuit of freedom within and beyond the mountains. This research is framed through Clyde Woods’s (1998) blues epistemological framework as applied to dialectical and paradoxical spaces (both past and present) in the coal town. Read the abstract here. Pictured is the concrete addition that was once part of Dunham High School, Letcher County’s all-Black school that operated between 1931-1964 in Jenkins, KY. The main structure was destroyed by fire in 1969. (Photo by Kristan McCullum) *In the introduction to the Verso paperback edition of Clyde Woods’s Development Arrested, Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “…we might better encounter archives as proposals rather than proofs. If proposals are evidence of struggle, they indicate, as Woods consistently argues, the perpetual presence of alternatives, neither lost nor in hidden transcripts, but rather out in the open, repeatable, simultaneously syncopating other worlds” (p. xiv). https://www.kristanmccullum.com/affiliated-research-projects daily 0.75 2021-10-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634730921846-GRB5MESLYTSTIT9PHNL5/Screen+Shot+2021-10-19+at+6.30.30+PM.png Affiliated Research Projects - Teachers in the Movement (TIM) Oral History Project The Teachers in the Movement (TIM) Oral History Project at UVA examines educators’ experiences inside and outside the classroom during the civil rights movement. As a researcher with TIM, I regularly conduct interviews with educators and assist with project management. I also served as lead organizer and planner of the 2021 annual institute for K-12 educators: “Narratives and Storytelling in Teaching Black History,” which focused on critical histories and teaching historical counter-narratives through oral histories and music. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616dd55c82afc5184b1f65b5/1634731731131-GB9WZRW3OV05O9GFSLVN/Screen+Shot+2021-06-30+at+4.17.57+PM.png Affiliated Research Projects - Educating for Democracy K-12 Curriculum Resources UVA’s Educating for Democracy (EFD) Initiative provides K-12 resources that address issues regarding race and justice and are developed through the lenses of developmental science and critical history. These materials provide historical counter-narratives often neglected within traditional curricula and provide a space for students to engage in dialogue. As a researcher with EFD, I led the unit planning, research, and writing on the middle school “Black Power Movements” unit, which traces the activism of organizations and movements such as SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and Black Lives Matter across the continuum of the broader Black Freedom Struggle. The unit provides primary sources, activist bios, and summaries. Pictured left: Marchers with signs at the March on Washington, 1963. Negative by Marion S. Trikosko, 1963. Prints & Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/2013648849/ Retrieved from https://unsplash.com/@libraryofcongress/