EDITORS' CORNER
Smith College welcomed a new crop of professors this year, including an “ethnomusicologist” as well as a “critical technology researcher” who is interested in “abolitionist” data practices.
Music Professor Lauron Kehrer, who uses “they/them” pronouns, “focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American popular music—especially hip-hop—particularly in the work of queer and trans artists,” Smith College wrote in its news release.
Kehrer’s contributions to public discourse include academic papers and essays titled, “You Bitches Wouldn’t Get It”: Queer Ludonarrativity in Lil Nas X’s “Late To Da Party (F*CK BET),” “Who Slays? Queer Resonances in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” and “Bounce Back: 5 Queer Bounce Artists To Twerk To,” according to the scholar’s curriculum vitae.
“Ludonarrative Dissonance is the conflict in a game that occurs when a games storyline doesn’t gel well with the games gameplay,” an article on Medium explains.
The professor (pictured) also has written book chapters titled “‘I’m a Whole Bisexual’: Cardi B, ‘WAP,’ and Bisexual Erasure” and ““Sampling Big Freedia: Context Collapse and the Ethics of Queer Sampling.”
The music professor also was “featured as an expert commenter on a segment of ABC News exploring how queer artists are finding success in the music industry.”
Kehrer comes to the university from Western Michigan University. While there, Kehrer researched LGBTQ rappers. The professor, in a 2023 interview, explained the source of her interest in this topic:
I approached it as both an insider and an outsider. I am an insider as a queer, gender non-conforming person seeking cultural expressions and music that reflects my experiences. I’m also an outsider as a white scholar working on a Black music genre, and my approach was to be aware of my status as a guest in this genre and while being aware of my whiteness, de-center it as best as I could. In my scholarship on Black music, I privilege frameworks and examples by Black queer and trans scholars and artists and pay particular attention to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.
Other professors who embrace identity politics and niche topics are coming to Smith.
New data science Professor Nikko Stevens comes from MIT’s “Data + Feminism Lab.” Stevens also uses “they/them” pronouns and previously used the name “Nikki,” according to the researcher’s personal website.
“Stevens is a critical technology researcher, studying how data infrastructures reinforce systems of oppression like white supremacy and transphobia,” Smith College wrote in its news release.
The professor is writing a monograph “about the role of software in the contemporary movement for prison abolition,” according to the private women’s college in Massachusetts.
The two scholars are joined by Ethel Barja, who studies “intertwining critical Indigenous studies, Afro-poetics, feminist theory, gender studies, decolonial studies, and posthuman studies.”
She has previously written an academic work about “Queering the Empire: Gender and Decoloniality in Twenty-First Century Latin American Poetry.”
MORE: Harvard hires drag queen ‘LaWhore Vagistan’ to teach ‘queer ethnography’
