Biography
Lisa Kingstone is an Associate Professor in Educational Foundations at Montclair State University, an interdisciplinary scholar interested in questions of race, identity and belonging. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, her M.A. from Columbia University and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts.
Research
Kingstone explores questions of identity by examining how we fashion narratives about ourselves in order to belong. But she is also interested in the more drastic forms of identity masquerade such as ‘passing’ in terms of race, gender, sexual preference, dis/ability, and class in order to survive physically and psychologically. Her book Fading Out Black and White: cultural ambiguity in American culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) explores the contemporary construction of race in an increasingly multi-ethnic, racially ambiguous, and culturally fluid country.
Currently, she is working on a mixed methods study of the first class in 1968 (of which she was a member) to be voluntarily integrated from kindergarten through high school in Berkeley California . She is tracing how this experience affected the children’s ability to socially integrate across racial lines and how it helped form their adult identities.