Research Interest

Broadly, my research investigates the ways that perceptions about identity categories impact the treatment of immigrant and American-born students of color in city schools.  I am interested in the impact of perceptions of race, ethnicity, immigrant status, class and gender on the school experiences and academic achievement of immigrant students (from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East) and American-born students of color in the United States, particularly in urban cities and schools. I am particularly interested in how school racialize students and the ways that students understand, navigate, respond, contest, resist, and reproduce racialized processes that impacts their success and humanity. Moreover, as a critical scholar, I seek to highlight and address the historical and socio-political issues faced by underrepresented, underserved, and disenfranchised students in the U.S. As a researcher, I seek to address inquiries that critically interrogates societal norm and power dynamics in ways that is useful for those who are underserved in the education system.

 Research Focus: The New Black African Diaspora in the U.S.

In 2020, there was an estimated 85.7 million (26 percent of the U.S. population) immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States (Batalova, Hanna, & Levesque, 2021). Among these newcomer immigrants is a group—Sub-Saharan Africans—who are often left out of the conversation on immigrants in U.S. school and society at large. African immigrants, a small but growing population, have significantly increased within the past five decades. In 2018, there were approximately 4.2 million Sub-Saharan Africans in the United States; 2 million being foreign-born and 2.2 million being American-born (Echeverria-Estrada & Batalova, 2019). While the foreign-born population (2 million) accounts for 4.5 percent of the foreign-born population in the U.S., this population have increase by 52% between 2010 and 2018. Indeed, this migration trend has been termed the “New African Diaspora” as it is argued that more Africans have migrated to the Americas voluntarily than the number of enslaved Africans brought to North America (388,000) during the transatlantic slave trade.