Meet Assistant Professor Rahsaan Mahadeo
Assistant Professor Rahsaan Mahadeo joined the African American & African studies department last fall after obtaining his PhD in sociology at the UMN. Much of his work is tied to his personal experiences and observations and he brings these observations to the classes he teaches, he says.
“I have learned that valuing wonderment and inquiry is sometimes more generative than valuing answers,” Mahadeo says. “Students learn that knowledge production first requires knowledge disruption. I ask students to apply a critical disability justice framework to critically examine the notion of “common sense.”
How did you become interested in what you study and teach?
I am trained as a sociologist. A friend of mine, who I admired because of her activism, introduced me to sociology as an undergrad. I was pursuing a degree in sociology and decided to double-major in both fields. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, I was fortunate to be part of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) interdisciplinary writing group. It was through this group and my connection to grad students in fields outside of my own that I was able to sharpen my analysis of race and time. During my first year as a graduate student, I took Dr. Rose Brewer’s Intellectual History of Race course and was eager to engage with the field of Black studies.
What questions and ideas are you most interested in exploring right now? What problems does your work seek to address?
I'm quite interested in insurgency and counterinsurgency. I just finished a paper that is a critique of “Black excellence” as an ableist concept and tool of counterinsurgency. The ableist undertones of “excellence” denies many Black youth the opportunity to feel weary, quiet, still, ambivalent, sad, and depressed, even when such feelings are products of anti-Blackness. Relatedly, I am interested in the ways the incorporation of minoritized difference operates to quell Black rage within a range of institutions, including the university. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are important themes within my courses on social movements.
I'm also currently interested in exploring what remains in the wake of deportation. I ask, “What if what remains are remains or remnants of relationships denied the opportunity to grow or flourish over time?” The absence of a loved one creates an unwanted space, specifically a void. This emptiness, though, is as temporal as it is spatial. The temporal dimensions of deportation and deportee temporality, thus, warrant investigation. How do children and youth reckon with parental incarceration and deportation temporally? To what extent is time for children of deported relatives compressed, protracted, and/or eliminated? What strategies do families use to sustain both relationships and temporal continuity? How do children and families make up not only for lost time, but stolen time?
I'm unsure whether my research can address deportation, but rather my aim is to reveal an absence. In this current political moment, there is a great deal of emphasis on keeping migrant children and families together, without much consideration for the aftermath of removal. Deportation is a social problem, but so is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). So is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). If anything, my hope is that my work can accompany an extensive set of scholarship seeking to ensure that these departments/agencies cease to exist.
What courses are you currently teaching or looking forward to teaching soon? What's special about them?
Last fall, I taught AFRO 1011 - Introduction to African American Studies and AFRO 3120 - Social and Intellectual Movements in the African Diaspora. This past semester (spring 2026), I co-taught CHIC 5920/AFRO 8910 - Proseminar in Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, with Professor Jimmy Patiño. I also taught Black Cultural Studies, which I taught for the first time in spring 2025. I am also looking forward to teaching courses within the Critical Disability Studies Initiative in the future. More than the content, students themselves make the courses most enjoyable and fulfilling.
What makes these courses special is that they do not perpetuate the notion of the university as a gatekeeper of knowledge or the primary site of knowledge production. There are countless sites of knowledge production outside the university, and there are plenty of intellectuals without extra initials behind their names capable of teaching those within the university more than they can ever be given credit for. Hence, my scholarship and pedagogy acknowledge the bidirectional teaching-learning relationship between university and community. Rather than privileging a fixed endpoint of knowledge attainment, I treat learning as an ongoing process. As I push students to engage earnestly with course content, I emphasize how critical thinking is both a learning outcome and part of a larger pedagogical process.
What are some takeaways students will get from your courses?
Recognizing the limits of conventional sites of knowledge production, I include learning and unlearning objectives in all my courses. I emphasize that unlearning itself is a form of learning. I strive to help students generate new questions as much as provide answers. Upending what a student believes they know about a particular topic will inevitably produce some fissures. However, I encourage students to treat ambiguity as arable terrain for pushing the boundaries of critical thinking, rather a deficit or lack of comprehension. What motivates me as a teaching scholar is the opportunity to create critical learning environments filled with invitations and provocations. I invite students to embrace the intimate connection between biography and scholarship. I also invite students to question the question, especially when such questions the parameters for discourse and the terms and conditions for agreement. My courses provoke students to distinguish between “schooling” and “education.” I am not interested in helping students improve their memorization skills to regurgitate textbooks. Instead, I acknowledge students’ capacity to analyze, synthesize, evaluate and apply what they learn inside and outside the classroom.
My courses also strive to uphold what I see as several key tasks of Black studies, including rewriting knowledge as we know it, challenging the truth of the “ruling episteme,” defining and/or questioning the concept of the human, as well as seeking to degenerate western civilization. These are all monumental tasks precisely because much of what students learn in my courses is at odds with much of what they have learned about the world and the way it functions. Hence, my emphasis on unlearning.
Students practice the following core competencies:
- Analytical & Critical Thinking
- Ethical Reasoning & Decision Making
- Innovation and Creativity
- Engaging Diversity
- Active Citizenship & Community Engagement
- Teamwork & Leadership
- Oral & Written Communication
Are you involved with any community-engaged projects or courses? Who are you partnering with and what are you learning and doing?
I currently organize with the Minnesota Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (MN-IWOC). Much of our work focuses on supporting currently and formerly incarcerated people. In the fall of 2025, we held the first End Slavery in Minnesota Higher Education summit at the University of Minnesota. Most of my work currently focuses on amplifying the energy and supporting the vision of the student organizers from a range of colleges and universities, including the University of Minnesota. My colleague, Professor Abigail Rombalski, and I recently received a Liberal Arts Engagement Hub residency for the 2026–27 academic year. Our project will focus on youth political education with members of YoUthROC. Our goal is to support youth in making connections between critical theories, political education, organizing strategies, and each other, in order to navigate and transform the systems that condition their material realities.
If you could design a course on any topic, what would it be and how would you frame it?
I'm interested in teaching a course on Black radical thought in the Caribbean. The course would center the work of scholars, artists, activists, and revolutionaries in the Caribbean. The course would speak to the political economy of the Caribbean, while also attending to the Caribbean as a unique site of knowledge production and dissemination across the African diaspora.
I would also love to teach a course on the connections between racism, colonialism, anti-Blackness, and animal liberation. The course would use total liberation as a theoretical framework to make sense of these connections.
This story was edited by Avery Vrieze, an undergraduate student in CLA.
