Robin McGinty

Background

About Robin McGinty

Robin McGinty is a graduate of the Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) Doctoral Program (Geography) at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to holding a Master of Public Administration degree (MPA) from CUNY Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Dr. McGinty has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the 2022 “Kathy Boudin Award for Research and Scholarship” offered by Citizens Against Recidivism in honor of the late Dr. Kathy Boudin’s life and legacy, who was a co-founder of the Center for Justice at Columbia University. Most recently, Dr. McGinty was named a 2022 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Leading Edge Fellow with The Center for Court Innovation in New York City. Dr. McGinty’s dissertation “A Labor of Livingness: Oral Histories of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women” considers the racialized and gendered spatial formations of the carceral sphere, its apparatus and function, which interrogates the carceral state’s historical and structural reach through the optic of formerly incarcerated Black women. Locating the prison as a site of carceral knowledge production and practices that stand in resistance to the prison and its afterlives, Dr. McGinty foregrounds the political subjectivity of formerly imprisoned Black women through their oral histories in conversation with contemporary discussions of mass criminalization and imprisonment. In offering the term “a labor of livingness” as the liberatory articulation and everyday practices of resistance to the prison as a site of ‘living death,’ Dr. McGinty’s research intentionally focuses on the experiences of ‘living the prison’ and its afterlives by currently and formerly incarcerated Black women, including that of her own experience of incarceration. In situating the ‘penal’ as a Black geography intimately bound up in the constellations of the historical Black freedom struggle, “A Labor of Livingness: Oral Histories of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women” offers a critical counter-narrative to the de-validation of currently and formerly incarcerated Black women’s lived carceral experiences and understandings. Dr. McGinty is a co-editor, along with CUNY professors Grace M. Cho and Rose M. Kim of “The Children of the People: Writings by and about CUNY Students on Race and Social Justice” published by DIO Press (August 2022).