About Me

Kaitlin Smith is a writer, scholar, educator, and Ph.D candidate at Harvard in History of Science where she researches the history of psychology and leverages contemplative, place-based methods in teaching. She is writing a dissertation on the history of the field of Black Psychology. Kaitlin has also developed original resources on giftedness from an intersectional perspective and offers related professional services. Kaitlin is writing a memoir on love, objectification, knowledge, and the natural world.

A Little Backstory

Following a series of formative professional experiences within the fields of mental health and higher education, I developed a deep and abiding interest in prevailing conceptions of knowledge (including what counts as knowledge, how we come to know, and who can be a knower) as well as their limitations in a more-than-human world brimming with mystery.

Since 2017, I have been engaged in experiments dedicated to freeing consciousness from various types of enclosures including mainstream sites of learning and healing, and prevailing ways of knowing that devalue bodily knowledge (and other extracognitive intelligences), disavow neurodiversity, and obscure our place as vital components of an intelligent, living world. My portfolio of projects past and present speak to these broad concerns in multiple registers and locations: on abstract and embodied levels, from the traditional classroom to the forest floor, and with audiences ranging from the general public to communities whose knowledge practices have been devalued and misrecognized.

Current Work

I am currently a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University where I am developing a dissertation on the history of the field of Black Psychology and its implications for the history of knowledge. This research agenda is informed by my past training and work as a psychotherapist at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and in other settings, along with continuing education in various critical psychological paradigms. I also teach students across departments as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard where I strive to integrate contemplative, place-based pedagogical approaches where possible to enliven inquiry.

I previously leveraged my academic and clinical training to lead my organization Our Wild Minds which offered an online course and virtual gathering place for Black adults from all over the world who identify as unusually intellectually intense, highly creative, and/or gifted. Though this work is no longer active, I continue to offer clinical consultations and limited coaching/mentoring in my areas of specialization. Learn more here.

Finally, I am also writing a memoir on love, objectification, knowledge, and the natural world.

Education

— Ph.D. History of Science, Harvard University (in progress)
— M.S.W. Clinical Social Work, Smith College School for Social Work
— B.A. Sociology and Anthropology, Swarthmore College

— Certificate in Ecopsychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute