Kahdeidra M. Martin

Assistant Professor of Education
Kahdeidra M. Martin wearing a black shirt.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Dr. Kahdeidra Monét Martin is a priestess in the asson lineage of Haitian Vodou and a transdisciplinary scholar of language and literacy. Through the lenses of critical race theory, intersectionality, and translanguaging, Dr. Martin uses qualitative and community-participatory methods to examine raciolinguistics and the co-naturalization of language, race, and spirituality in the lives of African descendant people globally.

Her narrative case study on Black students in independent schools received the 2022 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Qualitative Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. Dr. Martin received two grants funded by the Henry Luce Foundation to document religious racism and conduct oral history research on members of African Diasporic religious communities, resulting in the Embodied Memories podcast available on YouTube and Spotify. Before coming to Vassar, Dr. Martin was a Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric and Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, for which she received a 2023 Stanford Postdoc JEDI Champion Award.

BA, Stanford University; MPhil, CUNY Graduate School and University Center; MSEd, Long Island University-Brooklyn Campus; PhD, CUNY Graduate School and University Center
At Vassar since 2023

Research and Academic Interests

Intersectionality, Raciolinguistics, Linguistic Variation, Decolonial and Inclusive Pedagogy.

Narrative inquiry, interviews, focus groups, and community-based participatory methods.

Departments and Programs

Selected Publications

  • Martin, K.M. (In press). Speaking the pain, dressing the wounds: Developing racial and raciolinguistic literacies in the composition classroom. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics.

  • Martin, K.M. (2022, January). How Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used Black preaching traditions to deliver powerful speeches. Duo Lingo.

  • Schieble, M., Vetter, A., & Martin, K.M. (2020). Classroom talk for social change: Critical conversations in English language arts. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. * Winner of the 2021 Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st-Century Literacies Research

  • Martin, K.M., Aponte, G., & García, O. (2019). Countering raciolinguistic ideologies: The role of translanguaging in educating bilingual children. Cahiers internationaux de sociolinguistique, 16(2), 19-41. doi:10.3917/cisl.1902.0019. 

Grants, Fellowships, Honors, Awards

  • 2023: Stanford Postdoc JEDI Champion Award

  • 2022–2023: Community Fellow ($1,000), Project to Prevent Discrimination and Violence Against Black and African Religions, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

  • 2022–2023: Community Stories Fellowship ($10,000), The Crossroads Project, Princeton University

  • 2022: 2022 Qualitative Research SIG Outstanding Dissertation Award ($1,000), American Educational Research Association

  • 2020: Dean K. Harrison Dissertation Fellowship ($10,000), The Graduate Center, CUNY

  • 2020: Graduate Student Teaching Award ($1,000), The Graduate Center, CUNY

In the Media

Photos

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