Dr. Esther O. Ohito specializes in curriculum studies, Black studies, teacher education, and feminist-oriented qualitative research. She began her education career in 2004 as an elementary and secondary public school teacher in Chicago, IL. This is the hyper-segregated setting where her curiosity about curricula and pedagogies that attend to questions of justice and knowledge production vis-à-vis dilemmas of Blackness, race, and gender was piqued. She has since investigated related questions while serving as a faculty member and administrator at a range of schools and institutions.

Dr. Ohito is an interdisciplinary scholar who uses feminist qualitative approaches to research issues of Blackness, race, and gender at the nexus of curriculum, pedagogy, embodiment, and emotion. Broadly, she is interested in the generation and circulation of knowledges about Blackness, race, and gender in educational spaces, such as classrooms and extra-curricular programs. She is also concerned with the relationships between these knowledges and the (re)configuration of who is normatively constructed as quintessentially human. Her scholarship is shaped primarily by Black/Africana critical theory and Black feminist thought, as well as by her (remembrances of her) lived experiences, which include a history as a transnational/Black immigrant student, a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools system, and a teacher educator at various entities across the United States and the African diaspora.

Lucía is a 5th year doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Education and graduate assistant for the Geographies of Black Girlhoods in Education conference. Her research focuses on exploring the ways that learning is conceptualized outside and beyond western, white-dominated notions of schooling. She is a former high school counselor and worked in Boston, MA and Beirut, Lebanon before starting her graduate studies. She is a member of the Raíces Collective, a group of students at UNC committed to building refugios for students, staff, and faculty doing the everyday work of imagining and enacting abolition and decolonization in the university and beyond.  

Sherry L. Deckman, co-PI of the Geographies of Black Girlhoods in Education conference, is an associate professor of education at Lehman College, the City University of New York (CUNY) with an affiliation with the CUNY Graduate Center in the Urban Education and Social Welfare doctoral programs. She completed her doctorate at Harvard University.

Her current research and teaching focus on how educators are prepared to work with students from diverse race, class, and gender backgrounds, as well as how educators address issues of race, class, and gender inequity in schools. Her recent research has also explored how undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds negotiate race, class, and gender while participating in culturally focused performing arts groups.

She has been a high school teacher in Washington, DC and Fukuoka, Japan, and has supported beginning and pre-service teachers in Boston and Cambridge, MA, upstate New York, and across New York City. She began her work in education as a volunteer in Philadelphia public schools while pursuing her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Experiences in a West Philadelphia third grade classroom as a literacy volunteer with America Reads and as a tutor at a Youth Build Charter school in South Philadelphia incited her path in education and equity. She is currently editor of the Journal for Multicultural Education.

Her nieces inspire her commitment to research and teaching that prioritize the experiences of Black girls.

August is a doctoral student in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Their research broadly looks at race and racism in U.S. education. Their past research looked at the racial achievement gaps in Atlanta-area high schools. August’s current work uses critical race theory to investigate differences in students’ and teachers’ perceptions of their school with the goal of better understanding the impacts of culturally-sustaining empathetic practices. The overarching goal of their research is to understand how teachers and students can resist and subvert white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist exploitation.