Biography

Manbo Dr. Kahdeidra Monét Martin holds a B.A. degree in African & African American Studies with a minor in Linguistics from Stanford University. Dr. Martin received her Ph.D. in Urban Education from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and she uses qualitative methods to research African American Language, literacy, decolonial and culturally sustaining pedagogy, and belonging in schools. Currently, she works as a Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford, teaching first year students about the rhetorics of race, inequality, language, and education. Dr. Martin is a Manbo Asogwe in the asson lineage of Haitian Vodou and a member of the Bizango society. She has authored a series of bilingual English-Haitian Creole children’s books, and her personal essays on Vodou have appeared in Transition, a publication of the Hutchins Center of Harvard University, and the blog site Cornbread and Cremasse.

Crossroads Community Stories Fellow Project

Embodied Memories: Narratives of African Diasporic Religious Communities

Implicit and explicit biases against African diasporic religions (ADRs) abound in the United States, leading practitioners to be viewed as deviant, lacking character, and unintelligent. While studies of adult practitioners of ADRs are few, the experiences of youth are even fewer and are virtually non-existent in the field of education. Furthermore, existing literature skews heavily on communities in New York City and Florida, leaving the communities of the Bay Area in California underrepresented. In order to amplify the voices of the Vodou, Lucumi, Kongo, and other ADR communities in the Bay Area—highlighting the array of artists, activists, and educators who have sustained these traditions—this project uses a relational, narrative case study model to explore how adult and youth members of ADRs navigate dynamic and hyperlocal understandings of race, nation, religion, gender, and privilege in one geographic location. This research adds much-needed nuance to our understanding of ADR practitioners across the lifespan. Using the lenses of critical race theory and intersectionality, it will yield counter-narratives that foreground convergent marginalized identities of race, language, class, and religion.