Carter's research develops as a project of black study, at the intersection of anthropology, urban studies, and religious studies. She focuses broadly on the cultivation of black futures, tracing everyday conditions of structural and social violence and their transformation through the reconfiguration of kinship and relatedness, the role of ritual in the articulation of black social and spritiual value, and the centering of creative practice in the work of imagining otherwise. Moving from the persistence of black death to an anthropology of black aliveness, Carter's scholarship develops through engaged and multimodal forms of ethnographic and ethnohistoric study including oral history, artistic practice, and collaborative and creative non-fiction writing.
Carter's first book, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City (Chicago 2019) is a historical and ethnographic study of the reimagining of self, city, and society in New Orleans, the “Crescent City.” Set within an African American religious community in the years just after Hurricane Katrina, Carter examines how residents mourn and memorialize the dead, primarily the young black men who are most frequently the victims of homicide. Identifying a centuries-old system of erasure, particularly well illuminated in the wake of the storm, the book makes clear the doubly constituted nature of violence in poor black neighborhoods—with social death and physical death as concurrent realities. Yet Carter directs readers to the frameworks and practices of liberation that constitute the crescent or emergent city, focusing in particular on theologies of sacred humanity formed in and through the Black Church. Inspired by ministers who preach a current and critical vision of a beloved community and guided by grieving mothers who hold birthday parties for the deceased to assert the value and continued relatedness of lost loved ones, Prayers for the People traces the emergence of an old and new African American religious ideal. The book identifies a “restorative kinship” by which the faithful work against the denial of black personhood—as well as the violent severing of familial and social bonds—to recover and sustain their families and communities. Centering black women as the vital mediators of this work, Carter positions social and moral awakening alongside the necessary development of a connective politics, with the Black Church as a significant site of urban congregation and transformation.
Carter's current research, with two projects in development, explores a subtle but significant shift in orientation and method along the seam of black death and aliveness. The first project, Going Through the Motions: Animations of Black Being in the Breaks, is a short-form digital publication and "remix" of Carter's previous research in New Orleans. The book features essays, music, and drawn/animated portraits, which explore how black residents in the Crescent City grapple with conditions of precarity but also find ways to conceptualize, create, and embody black aliveness as an orientation, aesthetic, and mode of being. The second project, Ella and the Honey Path Walkers, is a historical and auto-ethnographic study of Carter's maternal ancestors, set in the Piedmont Region of South Carolina (Honea Path). Developed through archival research, oral history, portraiture, and creative nonfiction writing, the project foregrounds black aliveness within the broader context of emancipation, forced migration, and social, rural/urban, and economic upheaval.
