Scholarship

This is me, writing this page in the first person. Hello! I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. I am proud to be a founding faculty member in the department, which has an interesting history you can read here. I’m also an associate faculty member in the Department of Sociology, a faculty affiliate for the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and a member of the Committee on Education. I’m also a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California.

As a scholar, I am dedicated to drawing upon as many tools as I can to 1) interrogate racialized histories (meaning: understanding why and how the structures of race in this country look the way they do) and 2) imagine emancipatory possibilities (meaning: dreaming, developing, uplifting, and celebrating the many ways that people resist harm). Some of the tools I use include empirical research (meaning: gathering and analyzing data from the real world, often through interviews or observation) and archival research (meaning: using documents or original sources from history to understand the present and the future). This work is intertwined with my work as a writer, because I think it is through creative and artistic production that we imagine life as it could be, beyond documenting life as it is. I approach much of my research as a sociologist, meaning that I study how society works— how and why the social systems around us function. I have a particular interest in public schools, partially because I was once a middle school teacher, but also because schools play a unique role in our society. In a country that has very few universal offerings, public schools are a rare institution: they promise to serve, at least in theory, every child in this country, regardless of who they are or where they come from. But there are glaring holes in that promise. So, some of the questions that keep me up at night are: What are the ways that schools potentially worsen social inequality? To what degree are the inequalities we see in schools the result of injustice beyond the walls of the school building? And despite all this, how do teachers, students, families, and community members still manage to create moments of liberation within schools, in ways that can teach everyone else what freedom might look like?

Some of the theories and ideas that inform the way I do my work include afrofuturism (an aesthetic and political framework based on the premise that Black people exist in the future) and Black feminist epistemology (a framework for thinking about knowledge, evidence, and research that uplifts the importance of lived experience, dialogue rather than individual argument as a path to seeking understanding, an ethic of care, and an ethic of personal responsibility). I also work within the framework of critical race theory, particularly as outlined by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV and Tara Yosso. These scholars outlined the following core ideas, which undergird my work: 1) racism is endemic to American life, 2) nominal legal gains in the area of civil rights have been insufficient to address racism in American schooling, 3) there is no such thing as objective research, 4) experiential knowledge as well as methods such as storytelling, parables, and poetry are valid means to convey an argument, and 5) that education scholarship should have social justice as its central aim. I know that’s already a lot of theories, but here are just a couple more worth mentioning: my work is also ecological in nature; while education research that focuses solely on matters within the school building (such as curriculum and instruction) is crucial, my own interests lie in the ways that the school as an institution doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It sits within the context of the social forces that govern other important structures in our lives, such as housing, policing, health care. Schools are shaped by those forces, and shape them in turn. And young people within schools experience all of these forces at the same time, not in isolation. The small research group I direct at the University of Chicago is called the Beyond Schools Lab for this reason: because I think it’s impossible to understand what happens inside a school building without talking about what happens outside. Taking all of these ideas in sum, I see myself as a Du Boisian sociologist: committed to public work, multidisciplinary, and dedicated to uplifting the lived experiences of racialized people.

I like to talk! I have been an invited keynote or visiting lecturer at roughly 50 universities or convenings in 18 states, and I co-created the conference Cultivating Black and Native Futures in Education with my friend and colleague Amanda Tachine.

Some of the recent academic awards and honors I’m proud of include the Gordon J. Laing Award (2021), the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020), the University of Pennsylvania Outstanding Ethnography in Education Book Award (2020), and the O.L. Davis Jr. Outstanding Book Award from the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum (2019).

I’m a member of the American Educational Research Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Association of Black Sociologists.

My official faculty profile page can be found here.

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To learn more about Black feminist epistemology, I recommend Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, by Patricia Hill Collins. To learn more about ecological perspectives in research, a concept most closely associated with Urie Bronfenbrenner, this is a pretty good short video. To learn more about Du Boisian sociology, I recommend The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line, by José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown.