About

Christien Philmarc Tompkins is a professor associated with the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. The provided page text does not include specific details about his research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, no further biographical information is available from the given content.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• Pitch Black: How design entrepreneurs are rethinking race in post‐Katrina schools

  American Anthropologist · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics

  Abstract Putting anthropologists of design in conversation with Black studies, this article demonstrates how a group of repentant education entrepreneurs in post‐Katrina New Orleans mobilized racialized affective and narrative surplus within an information economy based on design rituals and protocols. I examine how this splinter group of education reformers established design communities through ritualized “pitches” and show how the egalitarian aspirations of designers rely on forms of empathetic erasure rooted in narratives of spectacular violence and universalist assumptions about the motivations, behaviors, and capacities of so‐called users and so‐called designers. While it is easy to laud the “empathy principles” of design thinking for taking seriously the agency and intellectual capacity of its racialized “users,” this article shares anti‐Blackness theorists’ skepticism of liberal humanization projects and is concerned with the burdens that the relationship between designers and users entails. What is the human at the center of design? Humanity here is not a shared essence, nor an egalitarian relation, but in this instance marks a process through which surplus affect and the spectacle of Blackness is instrumentalized and transmuted into racial capital.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pitching Race

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Burdensome Experiment: Race, Labor, and Schools in New Orleans after Katrina

  2024-01-01

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the “backbone” of the city’s Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children? The struggle over this question exposes the inherent antiblackness of charter school systems and the unequal burdens of school choice. “Anyone committed to creating liberatory models of education must read this book, not because it has all the answers but because it asks the right questions, with care and humility. And isn’t that what great teachers do?” — ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History, University of California, Los Angeles “Christien Philmarc Tompkins’s trenchant labor ethnography goes beyond ‘what works’ in urban schools to attend to a city still reeling from the institutional violence of post-Katrina school reform.” — SAVANNAH SHANGE, author of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco “Theoretically precise and powerfully personal, this ethnographic analysis is spot-on and a uniquely important contribution to real-world understandings of the ways that the universalized, normative whiteness so prominent in design worlds continues to damage and destroy while claiming to solve problems.” — ELIZABETH CHIN, Editor in Chief, American Anthropologist CHRISTIEN PHILMARC TOMPKINS is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Substituting Race

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• There’s No Such Thing as a Bad Teacher: Reconfiguring Race and Talent in Post-Katrina Charter Schools

  Souls · 2015-10-02 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Based on 16 months of fieldwork in New Orleans charter schools and education non-profits from 2010–2015, this article examines contested ideologies of teacher quality in the city's reform landscape. The article discusses how notions of good and bad teachers as well as talent and human capital come to be racialized. However, the article also considers how both pro and anti-charter school constituencies frame the question of teaching labor within an atomizing and individualistic lens and argues that we must attend to the teacher quality question as an ideological matter, not only one of practical efficacy.

  PublisherDOI

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  The University of Chicago

  2017

• Bachelors, Anthropology, African American Studies

  Columbia University

  2008