PhD Candidate in race, inequality, and language in education at Stanford Graduate School of Education

Kia Turner is pursuing a PhD in race, inequality, and language in education at Stanford Graduate School of Education. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in history and literature in 2016 and from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2017. She is also pursuing her JD at Yale Law School. Kia taught middle school English in Harlem for five years, where she instituted a culturally relevant “Tools for Liberation” advisory curriculum. Kia is a recipient of the National Council of English Teacher’s Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award, Teaching Tolerance’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. She is currently a Knight Hennessy Fellow, a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow, and a Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Fellow.

Kia’s research seeks to understand how we might operationalize abolitionist theory and Black creative practices in educational and legal research and practice to (re)imagine speculative and liberatory educational and criminal legal systems. Kia works directly with youth, community organizers, movement lawyers, and teachers to build research-practice communities founded on long-term relationality. She specifically aims to uplift Black and other minoritized youth as scholars by co-authoring with the community members she works with. Her work pulls methodologically from different disciplines, as she uses archival, participatory, poetic, and more traditional social scientific methods to syncretically make knowledge outside of epistemic domination.

Kia’s dissertation focuses on the long durée of artistic creation in abolitionist practice and theory. It does so through a historically grounded research intervention, inviting Black youth to use Black poetics and abolitionist theory to artistically reimagine legal decisions that have perpetuated carceral practices in and beyond educational systems. Ultimately, her dissertation aims to 1) deepen our understanding of the ancestral and contemporary role of the arts in abolitionist practice, 2) position Black youth as legal knowledge creators, and 3) introduce a framework for the dovetailing of artistic, participatory, and social science methods in studies that aim to build abolitionist futures.