Kevin Rigby Jr.

Kevin Rigby Jr. is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. A scholar of Black Studies and political theory, his work examines the meaning of Black protest in the twenty-first century and the relationship of blackness to political possibility and imagination more broadly. His current research focuses on the 2020 Minneapolis uprising and the broader movement for Black lives, interrogating how antiblackness structures political life and what protest reveals about the limits and possibilities of resistance, solidarity, and democracy.

He earned his PhD in African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation, Black Protest at the Limits of the Political: Reading the 2020 Minneapolis Uprising, brought together political and critical theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, critical media studies, and digital archival methodologies to analyze the Minneapolis Uprising, George Floyd Square, and related sites of protest. The project challenges conventional readings of Black protest that tether its meaning to democratic renewal and solidarity. His book project, now in development, extends this research to consider how Black struggle unsettles political theory’s categories of resistance and “the political” itself, as well as Black Studies’ liberal humanist and democratic frameworks for interpreting protest and political action.

Dr. Rigby’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and he has been profiled in outlets such as Ebony and the Detroit Free Press. Beyond academia, he brings years of experience as a community, electoral, and labor organizer, including co-founding the Detroit chapter of Black Youth Project 100 and organizing gig workers with SEIU 1021 in the San Francisco Bay Area.