Harry Kiiru

Harry Kiiru is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of African Cultural Studies. His scholarly interests lie in the intersections of Blackness, Africanness, and multilingualism within a diasporic context. His concern is with how the new diaspora (Black African immigrants) negotiate Blackness, immigration, and language as they navigate insider/outsider locations in their new and former homes. In particular, Harry is interested in the phenomenology of Blackness and the valuation and devaluation of the Black body, the relationship between space and multilingualism (sociolinguistics), the relationship between race and language (raciolinguistics), and translanguaging as a theory of language in describing the new diaspora’s language practices (applied linguistics). Lastly, he is interested in autoethnography as a research method and genre of writing in capturing the experiences of the new diaspora.