Book Editors & Contributors
Editors
Dr. Edwin Mayorga (he/him/his) is a parent-educator-activist-scholar, and Associate Professor of Educational Studies and Latin American/Latino Studies at Swarthmore College (PA). He is the director of the #BarrioEdProject, a youth participatory action research (PAR) collaborative & afterschool club; the Community, School, and Colleges Partnership (CSCP) project; and the #EthnicStudiesPHL curricular project. Edwin teaches & writes about racial neoliberal urbanism, scholar-activism, participatory action research (PAR) entremundos, decolonization, critical racial/ethnic studies and teaching for racial and economic justice. He is a lead co-editor of the online journal #CritEdPol, and co-editor of the book What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality (2015, 2020). He is on the board of the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAPP), the Education Law Center, PA (ELC), and on the K-16 Advisory of the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (PHENND).
Dr. Ujju Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning in the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School. Her research examines questions related to public education, urban space, racial capitalism, rights, gender, and the state. This research focus grows out of her long-time work that has centered on building local and national organizations and initiatives for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, and transformative justice as well as projects that focus on the intersection of arts and social justice, popular education, and adult literacy. She is completing her first monograph, a historically informed ethnography of choice as it emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States. Ujju is co-editor of What’s race got to do with it? How current school reform policy maintains racial and economic inequality 2nd Edition (2020). She currently serves on the Board of Teachers Unite! and is an Advisory Board Member of the Parent Leadership Project (Bloomingdale Family Head Start Center, PLP) and of PARCEO (Participatory Action-Research Center for Education Organizing
Dr. Bree Picower is a Professor at Montclair State University in the College of Education and Human Development. She is the Co-Director of the Transformative Education Network at Montclair State University which hosts the Urban Teacher Residency, Newark Teacher Project and the Critical Urban Education Speaker Series. Her newest book, Reading, Writing and Racism, is an unflinching examination of recent examples of viral racist curriculum and what it means for our educational institutions to take responsibility for addressing teachers’ understandings of race.
Contributors
Dr. Wayne Au is a Professor in the School of Educational Studies and Dean for Diversity and Equity at the University of Washington Bothell, and he is affiliated faculty with the Banks Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington. Au is also a long-time editor for the social justice teacher magazine Rethinking Schools, and most recently he co-edited Rethinking Ethnic Studies, as well as Teaching for Black Lives.
Dr. Rick Ayers is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of San Francisco in the Urban Education and Social Justice cohort. He focuses on curriculum and pedagogy, with particular focus on equity, social justice, and decolonial approaches to education. His most recent books include An Empty Seat in Class: Teaching and Learning after the Death of a Student and You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones: And 18 Other Myths about Teachers, Teachers’ Unions, and Public Education.
Dr. William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar (retired) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Demand the Impossible!; Fugitive Days; Public Enemy; Teaching Toward Freedom; To Teach: The Journey in Comics; and School: About Becoming a Teacher.
A teacher and qualitative researcher by training, Dr. Amy Blizard Brown (formerly Amy Brown) was inspired to enter the field of cultural anthropology after five years teaching English in Brooklyn public schools. Amy has teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate levels and, before joining KPMG's Innovation Lab as a Manager, worked as an independent consultant, researcher and case writer for organizations including The Wharton School, The Governor’s Coaching Corps of Indiana and Rhode Island, Leadership for a Networked World at Harvard University, and Promise54. Through her consulting work, she has found passion in doing impact-driven ethnographic and qualitative research and writing, as well as facilitation.
Dr. Brian Jones is an educator and activist in New York, and the Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He is working on a book manuscript about the 1960s Tuskegee student movement.
Dr. Pauline Lipman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education (CEJE), University of Illinois at Chicago, and an education activist and political organizer. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on globalization and the political economy of urban education, particularly the relationship of education policy, neoliberal urban restructuring and white supremacy, and resistance of grassroots organizing for education justice. In The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City, she examines these dialectics in Chicago. Pauline is currently writing about the present crisis of racial capitalism and the possibilities and dangers for social movements and radical social transformation.
Dr. Tom Liam Lynch is Director of Education Policy at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School and Editor-in-Chief of InsideSchools. A former educational technology professor, English teacher, and school district official for the New York City Department of Education, Dr. Lynch led the implementation of a $50M online learning program in over 100 schools called iLearnNYC. He then architected and drove the implementation of WeTeachNYC, a $6.8M digital resource repository, learning environment, and blended learning program for the city’s 80,000 teachers. Dr. Lynch researches the relationship between software theory, literacy, and education reform. He has written dozens of articles and presented the world over on educational technologies, school reform, new literacies, and K-12 computer science.
Dr. David Stovall is Professor of African-American Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation and the Politics of Interruption and co-author of Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education
Dr. Terrenda White is Associate Professor of Education Policy at the University of Colorado Boulder. She earned her PhD in Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She explores the impact of market-based school reforms on Black teachers and communities of Color, including school working conditions, teachers’ classroom practices, teacher attrition, and contemporary forms of teacher activism. She is co-author of a book on education policy and charter schools, called Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education (2018). She is a former elementary school teacher and former co-coordinator of the People’s Education Initiative (PEI) on Rikers Island in New York.