Lisa Beard

Assistant Professor

About

Lisa Beard is an Assistant Professor in Political Science with a research focus in race, gender, and sexuality politics and political thought. 

Their first book, If We Were Kin: Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals (Oxford University Press, 2023), is based on research that was selected for the American Political Science Association’s 2017 Best Dissertation Award in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and is about the we of politics—how that we is made, fought over, and remade—and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. Drawing on the political provocations of James Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, Lorraine Hansberry, and grassroots LGBTQ activists, the book traces a distinct lineage of identificatory appeals from within race and gender justice movements that challenge atomized and hierarchical racial formations in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. Additional research is published or forthcoming in American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, National Political Science Review, and in the edited volume, A Political Companion to James Baldwin. Before coming to Western Washington University, Dr. Beard was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside; a Wayne Morse Dissertation Fellow at the University of Oregon; and a community organizer and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Research Interests

  • Race, Gender, and Sexuality Politics; Political Thought; Black Politics and Black Political Thought

Current Courses

PLSC 261, Intro to Political Theory (Spring 2024)

 

 

Selected Publications

2023. If We Were Kin: Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals. Oxford University Press: 2023.

2023. “From Dynamite Hill to The Black Power Mixtape: Angela Davis on the Violence/Nonviolence Binary and the Mediation of Black Political Thought.” Political Theory 50.4: 645-673.

2022. “On the Map: Feminist Political Ethnography in Gendered Citizenship.” Comparative Political Theory 2: 7-12.

2019. “Submerged and Contained: The Figure of Race in American Political Science.” National Political Science Review (now National Review of Black Politics) 20.1: 19-24.

2017. “James Baldwin on Violence and Disavowal.” In A Political Companion to James Baldwin, Susan McWilliams (Ed.), The University Press of Kentucky.

2016. “‘Flesh of their Flesh, Bone of their Bone’: James Baldwin’s Racial Politics of Boundness.” Contemporary Political Theory 15.1: 378-398.