ON BLACK POLITICAL SUBJECT FORMATION
A lecture & discussion with Kevin Rigby, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of African American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

How are political subjects made under conditions that continually delimit their political agency? This lecture theorizes youth organizing as a site of political formation, focusing on young Black organizers involved in the racial justice movements of the 2010s and the struggle to “Defund the Police.” Dr. Kevin Rigby argues that political agency is not a possession individuals bring to political life, but a capacity forged through collective struggle: through organizing, political education, dissent, and the experimental work of testing the boundaries of political possibility. Yet, he is ultimately concerned with the afterlife of movements: how political capacities persist, mutate, or disappear when mobilization ends, and what their uneven survival reveals about the structure through which Black political subjectivity is produced. Drawing on political theory and archival materials, Dr. Rigby argues that political ontology is materially contingent: the capacities through which political subjects emerge, act, and persist depend upon the social, organizational, and material conditions that movements create and struggle to sustain.

Kevin Rigby, Jr., is Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate and 2026 College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Emerging Scholar in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. A scholar of Black political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, his work examines the meaning (and the meaning made) of Black protest in the twenty-first century and the relationship of blackness to political possibility and imagination more broadly. He earned his BA in African American Studies from Wayne State University, after which he completed a post-baccalaureate research fellowship (ESI PREP) in African American Studies at Yale University, before earning his MA and PhD in African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.