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I am a sociologist interested in issues of self and identity formation and transformation in school settings.  Newly arrived at The Graduate Center, CUNY, I am a Professor in the Urban Education and Social-Personality Psychology programs.   I came from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where I held the Nancy Pforzheimer Aronson Chair in Human Development and Education (1999-2009).  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).

At the core of my scholarship is an abiding interest in explaining how gender, race, class and sexuality systems of inequality take root in people’s own self-evaluations and actions, including our sense of exclusion, entitlement, constraint, possibility, success and failure. My research brings distinctive qualitative data to bear on complex social and psychological processes; extending the tradition of ethnography by offering research participants an active role in representing their worlds, as they understand them.  I have designed image-based, arts-informed research activities as a means to offer young people/children an opportunity to express, alter, and be in control of their self-representations.  My current project, Children Framing Childhoods, follows thirty-four diverse, low-income (mostly immigrant) children from elementary school to high school and identifies the role that gender, race and immigrant status play in how they portray their social and emotional worlds.  I have authored two award winning books, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling, and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens; and am editor of Qualitative Educational Research: Readings on Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice.

Ever since 1975, when I co-founded the Community Women’s Education Project in Philadelphia, I have been dedicated to community-based, university, and teacher inquiry projects that advance affective, moral and social justice in and around schools, and that promote innovative research and teaching practices.