Research

My research examines how educational institutions produce, sustain, and respond to racial harm, with particular attention to the organizational processes, policies, and practices that shape students' educational experiences. Drawing on critical perspectives on race, inequality, and schooling, I investigate how institutional arrangements reproduce inequities and how educators, families, and communities navigate, challenge, and seek to transform them.

Across my work, I am interested in the relationship between educational policy and everyday practice, the possibilities and limitations of institutional reform, and the conditions necessary for more equitable and accountable public schools. My scholarship attends to how seemingly ordinary institutional decisions and routines can produce consequential differences in students' educational experiences, even within schools and districts explicitly committed to equity.

Methodologically, my research brings together ethnographic inquiry, qualitative interviews, archival and policy analysis, and quantitative data to examine educational inequality across historical and contemporary contexts. I am particularly interested in connecting the experiences of students, families, and educators to the broader organizational structures that shape schooling, while exploring how research can inform institutional accountability and meaningful educational change.

Dissertation Research

Toward Racial Repair: Understanding the Production of Racial Harm in Early Elementary Discipline

My dissertation examines how racial harm is produced, experienced, and resisted through disciplinary systems in early elementary school sites. Using an ethnographic approach that integrates archival and policy analysis, quantitative discipline data, and qualitative interviews and observations, I investigate how institutional policies, organizational decision-making, and everyday practices shape the experiences of students, families, and educators.

This research moves beyond documenting racial disparities to understand the institutional processes that produce them and the possibilities for meaningful racial repair.

Selected Research Projects

Freedom Dreaming in California Ethnic Studies Classrooms

Co-Principal Investigator | Stanford Accelerator for Learning, Stanford University | 2023–2026

This research-practice partnership brought together university researchers and San Francisco Unified School District educators to co-design, implement, and study a middle school Ethnic Studies curriculum. Drawing on social design-based research, the project examined the pedagogical, political, and organizational conditions shaping Ethnic Studies implementation, with particular attention to culturally and historically responsive teaching, educator collaboration, and student learning.

DisCrit Incarcerated: Exploring the Demographics & Trajectories of Incarcerated Youth 

Graduate Research Assistant | Stanford University | 2025–Present

Led by Dr. Subini Annamma, this national mixed-methods study examines how youth incarceration reflects and reinforces intersecting systems of racial, disability, and educational injustice. My work includes qualitative coding and statistical analysis of survey and interview data collected across seven states, investigating young people's experiences within carceral educational systems and the institutional processes that contribute to educational exclusion.

Illuminating the Textures of Disability–Race Intersections

Graduate Research Assistant | Stanford University | 2022–2026

Led by Dr. Alfredo Artiles and Dr. Michael Hines, this interdisciplinary oral history project investigates the historical roots of racial inequities in special education through a landmark 1970s legal case. My work involved conducting and analyzing more than fifteen interviews with educators and advocates, alongside archival research, to examine how racialized diagnostic practices shaped educational experiences and opportunities for students of color.