Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Rebecca Louise Carter

Fall 2021 Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies
Project "Experimental Ethnography and Black Life Itself"
Last updated August 9, 2022, based on June 2021 biographical sketch

Biography

Rebecca Louise Carter is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies. Her research focuses broadly on the cultivation of Black urban futures, particularly through the tracing of everyday conditions of structural and social violence and their reconfiguration via creativity, kinship and relatedness, and new forms of humanism and sovereignty. Her first book, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City (University of Chicago Press, 2019), follows the religious work of African Americans in New Orleans who continuously raise the dead through restorative practices of kinship, which circumvent the denial of Black personhood and assert the social and spiritual value of the Black family in the crescent or emergent city. She has published several related articles and essays, most recently in City & Society, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies and Visual Anthropology Review.

At the Cogut Institute, she worked on projects centering Black children and youth through engaged and multimodal forms of ethnographic and ethnohistoric practice including oral history, photography, film/animation, and collaborative and creative nonfiction writing.