Faculty Campus Visit - Talk: Alaina Neal-Jackson
In Person: Brownlee Room (SEB 2327)
Remote: https://umich.zoom.us/j/98645289084 (Passcode: Clinical)
This talk is part of the faculty search for a Clinical Assistant professor in Educational Studies with a focus on race and anti-racism, in particular as associated with foundations of schooling, teaching, learning, and teacher education. We ask all attendees to contribute to the search process by completing a candidate evaluation form.
Please join us in person so that our candidates have a good audience. There will also be options to participate via virtually live or to watch a recording. Please RSVP here so we can plan accordingly.
RESEARCH AND TEACHING TOPICS
What's in a Form?: Interrogating disciplinary forms as critical, sites of dehumanization.
Alarmingly, Black girls are experiencing the fastest growing suspension rates of all students within US public schools, despite not engaging in more wrongdoing than their peers. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic investigation of one predominantly Black high school (JHS), and grounded in Black feminist theory, this talk explores Black girls' inequitable interactions with exclusionary discipline. In particular, the research portion will explore how office referrals were structured in JHS and what that structuring meant in practice for the humanization or dehumanization of Black girls during disciplinary interactions. The teaching demonstration will draw upon this research and explore how school officials can responsibly use the power embedded within referral forms to construct behavior narratives that respect Black girls' autonomy and personhood at all times.
ABOUT ALAINA NEAL-JACKSON
Dr. Alaina Neal-Jackson is the Educational Culture and Justice Coordinator for the Detroit P-20 Partnership in the School of Education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she also received her doctorate in Educational Studies. Her research is centered on race and gender in schooling as per a larger interest in the health and welfare of Black students particularly, but not singularly, in underserved contexts. More specifically, drawing upon sociological frames and critical race and gender theories, Dr. Neal-Jackson examines how schools, as social institutions, structure Black girls' and women's experiences and opportunities, and in what ways this structuring reproduces social inequalities along raced, gendered, and classed lines. Her scholarship has been published in Review of Educational Research, Teachers' College Record, The Journal of College Student Development, and The Journal of Educational Administration and History. She is a proud alumna of the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. Prior to completing her doctorate she received a B.A. in Rhetoric, Narrative and Image from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.A. in Educational Leadership and Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.