About the Authors

Arshad I. Ali is Assistant Professor of Educational Research at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at The George Washington University. Dr. Ali is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies youth culture, race, identity, and democratic engagement in the lives of young people. His research examines the construction of racial identities through exploring the tropes of democracy, liberalism, and modernity in the lives of youth. Dr. Ali is currently completing a book manuscript examining the cultural geography of Muslim student surveillance in the United States. Dr. Ali is also coeditor of At War: Challenging Racism, Militarism, and Materialism in Education (Fordham University Press), a collection of essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.

Ayana Allen, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Policy, Organization, and Leadership at Drexel University. Her research interests include examining issues of access, equity, and social justice in urban schools and communities. She is engaged in youth participatory action research (YPAR) that builds upon a community cultural wealth framework and the positive identity development of historically marginalized children. She is coeditor of Autoethnography as a Lighthouse: Illuminating Race, Research, and the Politics of Schooling as well as recently published articles in Equity and Excellence in Education and The Education Law & Policy Review.

Aviva Bower, a former German language teacher with a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Iowa, worked as an educator in Finland for five years to explore the relation of culture and learning prior to her doctoral work in educational psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After completing her PhD, she taught educational and developmental psychology for 14 years in the Thelma P. Lally School of Education at the College of Saint Rose. She left her position as an Associate Professor to work in the Institute for Teaching, Learning and Academic Leadership, University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research interests center on the roles of place and fantasy in education, ethnography, and teacher preparation.

Jesse Davie-Kessler completed her Doctorate in Anthropology at Stanford University and lectured for two years at Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. She is interested in the interface between ethnography and learning, and currently explores this area in her current work as a User Experience Researcher at Chegg. There, she explores the challenges high students face in their academic preparation for college. Her past research examines the learning process through which Nigerian born-again Christians begin to experience feelings of God, as well as the possibilities and challenges of representing others’ embodied experiences through ethnographic writing. Jesse has also facilitated a community-based learning program in which college students learned about and contributed to nonprofit organizations through ethnographic research and writing.

Stephen D. Hancock, PhD, is Associate Professor of Multicultural Education in the Department of Reading and Elementary Education at UNC Charlotte where he also serves as the Assistant Director of the Urban Education Collaborative. He is an International Visiting Professor at the Pedagogische Hocshule in Ludwigsburg, Germany, where he teaches Diversity and Globalization in Education. Dr. Hancock’s research interest supports, academic relationships in urban school context, reading practices and strategies for urban students, ethnographic and autoethnographic methodologies, and White teacher effectiveness in multicultural spaces. He is the editor of Autoethnography as a Lighthouse: Illuminating Race, Research, and the Politics of Schooling as well as White Women’s Work: Examining the Intersectionality of Teaching, Identity, and Race.

Diane M. Hoffman is Associate Professor of social foundations of education at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia. She earned her PhD in education from Stanford University, and specializes in the anthropology of education and anthropology of childhood and youth. Her research considers the cultural dimensions of education very broadly, with a focus on the relationship between education and identity in diverse contexts. Since 2007, she has been trying to understand the complex situation of children and youth in Haiti, with a focus on youth agency in non-formal and informal education.

Rodney Hopson, Ph.D., is Professor, Division of Educational Psychology, Research Methods, and Education Policy, College of Education and Human Development and Senior Research Fellow, Center for Education Policy and Evaluation, George Mason University. Previously, he served as Hillman Distinguished Professor, Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership in the School of Education, and teaching faculty member in the Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research and Honors College in the School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University. He received his Ph.D. from the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia with major concentrations in educational evaluation, anthropology, and policy, and sociolinguistics.

Hopson has published in such venues such as Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, International Journal of Human Rights, Journal of Negro Education, New Directions for Evaluation, Race, Ethnicity, & Education, Review of Educational Research, and Urban Education. In addition to serving as editor of the Studies in Educational Ethnography, Emerald Publishers, he is co-editor of Educational Policy as/in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies, Information Age Book Series and currently serves as North American co-editor of Education and Ethnography.

Lionel C. Howard, EdD, is Assistant Professor of Educational Research at The George Washington University. Dr. Howard’s research interest include, gender identity development and socialization, motivation and academic achievement, and quantitative and qualitative research methodology. Dr. Howard has published in Journal of Black Psychology, Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Journal of Boyhood, International Journal of Inclusive Education, and Harvard Educational Review, and is coeditor of Facing Racism in Education. He received his EdD in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, and completed an National Institute of Child Health and Development postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Psychology and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.

Maria Mercedes “Ched” Estigoy Arzadon is a Filipino, a PhD candidate of Anthropology/Sociology of Education and Assistant Professor at the College of Education, University of the Philippines. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Nonformal Education, Socio-Cultural Foundation of Education and Philippine Educational System. Her current research interests and advocacies are on Teacher Agency, Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education, Recognition of Prior Learning, and Alternative Education for out-of-school children, youth and adults. She has presented papers both in local and international conferences. Government education bodies and NGOs invite her to facilitate teachers in-service training, participate in policy review and help develop mother tongue and culturally responsive instructional materials. She has been dabbling with social media since the 1990s and has created several online communities and blogsites for her advocacies.

Shameka Powell is Assistant Professor of Educational Studies and affiliated with the Master of Arts in teaching program in the Department of Education at Tufts University. Dr. Powell’s research focuses on equality of educational opportunity and the intersections of race, class, and gender in school spaces. Specifically, they interrogate how institutional agents create, exacerbate, and alleviate stratification patterns within schools. Additionally, Dr. Powell examines critical literacy approaches teachers and students employ within classrooms. They situate their research within Critical Race Theory and Queer of Color Theories. They were awarded the 2016 Dissertation of the Year award from American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Division G: Social Context of Education.

Anne T. Vo, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education at the Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California. Dr. Vo’s interests lie at the intersection of comparative evaluation theory, evaluation capacity building, and organizational development. She has taught graduate-level courses on research methodology and design as well as evaluation. Dr. Vo holds leadership positions with the Research on Evaluation Divisions of the American Educational Research Association and American Evaluation Association. She coedited a book, titled, Evaluation Use and Decision Making in Society and has published in several peer-reviewed journals. She also serves as editor of the American Journal of Evaluation’s section on Teaching and Learning Evaluation.

Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson is Assistant Professor of Human Development at Binghamton University. She is an anthropologist of education whose research agenda focuses on ethnographically understanding and transforming the cultural conditions in schools that produce inequitable outcomes. Using the methodological tools of critical ethnography, discourse analysis, and the theoretical lenses of critical race theory and whiteness studies, her research seeks to understand the (re)production of both educational advantage and disadvantage. Her current collaborative work is focused on understanding and interrupting the national trend of racialized disciplinary practices in schools through an innovative approach to parent engagement.

Denise Gray Yull is Assistant Professor of Human Development at Binghamton University, whose work focuses on the influence of structural factors that impact educational disparities in both rural and urban marginalized communities in the context of secondary and higher education. Her scholarly research interests focus on Black students, schooling, student engagement, collective parent engagement, school-family-community partnerships, and the impact on Black families and other families of color. Dr. Yull’s scholarly research provides innovative and culturally grounded theoretical and empirical frameworks for understanding the sociocultural contexts of educational disparities for Black youth and school disconnections for Black families.