About
My research and teaching career has been dedicated to “public sociology”– a sociology that raises public awareness about social issues and seeks to impact policy and practice in service of social justice. For me, this has meant crossing the borders of social science research and the humanities to offer people – most especially children and young people who are often missing from public debate — an active role in representing their worlds, as they understand them.
Ever since 1975, when I co-founded the Community Women’s Education Project (CWEP) in a Philadelphia neighborhood suffering from economic disinvestment, I have focused on community assets, advocacy, and creative collaborations. This commitment has guided my work in rural and urban communities – whether in residence at the Highlander Education and Research Center in New Market, TN, where I collaborated with grassroots leaders and community organizers to develop community-based economics education materials through storytelling, or in diverse urban public school sites (Philadelphia, Durham, Boston, Worcester, New York City) where I have found arts-infused research most effective in working with teachers, children and young people.
My research focuses on how gender, race, class and sexuality-based systems of inequality get internalized, especially in school settings where exclusion, entitlement, constraint, and possibility take root in student’s own self-evaluations and actions. These dynamics are explored in my two books: School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (1997) winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, American Sociological Association in 1998; and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (2003), winner of the Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association, Section on Race, Class and Gender in 2005.
I am privileged to be a Professor of Urban Education, Sociology, Critical Social/Personality Psychology and Women and Gender Studies at the Graduate Center (GC) of the City University of New York, an institution dedicated to scholarship that serves the public interest. Currently I also serve as the Executive Officer of the Urban Education Ph.D. Program. Our program is committed to critical and interdisciplinary studies in urban education, with a focus on diversity, equity, social justice and public facing scholarship. The program prepares students with the necessary theoretical and methodological tools to understand urban education as part of other interconnected systems of urban life and to translate research findings into educational practice, policies, curricula, and political action. As members of the City University of New York, we situate our scholarship within New York City schools and communities, while also building connections with practitioners and researchers across the country and the world.
Before joining the GC faculty, I held the Nancy Pforzheimer Aronson Chair in Human Development and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (1999-2009), and before that I taught in the Sociology and Cultural Anthropology Departments at Duke University and co-founded the Duke Center for Teaching and Learning (1988-1999).
My publishing record reflects my commitment to public sociology as I have sought to reach multiple audiences – whether through my academic publications and editing the volume, Qualitative Research in Education: Readings in Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice (2010); writing adult literacy curriculum; designing teacher professional development materials [e.g. Project ASSERT (Accessing Strengths and Supporting Resistance in Teaching) and Collaborative Seeing: Adapting Photo-Voice in the Creative Inquiry for Classrooms, Communities, Social Movements Series); conducting evaluations and compiling research reports; or organizing exhibitions and producing exhibition catalogues.
In previous years I have benefitted from fellowships including the Rockefeller Foundation (1998-1999); American Council of Learned Societies (1994 & 2015); Spencer Foundation (2000-2001), a Marie Curie Fellowship at University College of Dublin (2009); and research awards from Professional Staff Council-City University of New York Research Awards (2011, 2012, 2015, 2017); William F. Milton Fund Award, Harvard University (2007) and Duke University Arts and Science Research Council (1995).
