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 book project, tentatively titled Black Protest at the Limits of the Political traces a seemingly intransigent aporia at the heart of black political ontology: blackness names a limit to political intelligibility, not an identity or position, but which cannot be fully rendered within political, moral, or social frames. Through a psychoanalytic and philosophical engagement with contemporary black protest, particularly the Black Lives Matter movement, and the history of urban rebellions more broadly, the book traces the ways that traditions of black political philosophy, interpretative practices used by activists, scholars, and media to make black revolt legible to political rationality and solidarity, frequently circumscribe what our understanding of black politics and protest can offer to political thinking. By working at this limit of the political, the book aims to offer a political theory of blackness that moves past the present impasse in political discourse that struggles to generate compelling analysis of racial identity, politics, and power adequate to contemporary crises. 

Dr. Rigby’s first peer-reviewed article, "What Does Black Protest Appear to Be?" published in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, received an Honorable Mention for the Faculty Prize for Research in the Humanities from the Humanities Research Institute at University of Illinois. He has also 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.