Karilyn Crockett
Karilyn Crockett
Co-founder, Multicultural Youth Tour Of What’s Now, an award-winning, educational non-profit organization
Visiting Scholar 2013-2014
Hosted by Profs. Larry Vale, Anne Spirn, and Bish Sanyal, Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Bio
Karilyn Crockett received her PhD from the American Studies Program at Yale in 2013. Her research investigates large-scale land use changes in the U.S. and how these changes propel new kinds of twentieth century social movements and political organizations among grassroots actors. In addition to a spatialized approach to historical investigation, she privileges memory studies as fundamental for destabilizing the hegemony of “expert-generated” official histories and for interrogating the formal limits of the archive as an exclusive site for local and national knowledge production.
Dr. Crockett co-founded Multicultural Youth Tour Of What’s Now (MYTOWN), an award-winning, educational non-profit organization. A Boston organization, MYTOWN hired public high school students to research their local and family histories to produce youth-led walking tours for sale to public audiences. During its nearly 15 years of operation, MYTOWN created jobs for more than 300 low and moderate-income teenagers, who in turn led public walking tours for more than 14,000 visitors and residents. The National Endowment for the Humanities cited MYTOWN as “One of ten best Youth Humanities Programs in America.”