Creative Inquiry for Classrooms, Communities, and Social Movements

Wendy Luttrell is Professor of Urban Education, Sociology and Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research on educational inequality examines the interplay of social structure and subjective experience in school settings, focusing on how a sense of belonging, exclusion, entitlement, constraint, possibility, success and failure take root in young people’s self-evaluations and actions. She is the author of two award-winning books on this topic, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (1997) and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (2003) and is also the editor of Qualitative Educational Research: Readings on Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice (2010). Her forthcoming book, Children Framing Childhoods: Working-class Kids’ Visions of Care (Policy Press, 2020) examines the role that gender, race, and immigrant status play in how diverse, young people growing up in urban, working-class communities portray their lives through photographs and video. At a time when distorted and increasingly fractious visions of “marginalized” communities proliferate, the book and its multimodal platform of photographs and videos compels readers/viewers to reconsider their ways of seeing and valuing poor and working-class children of color, their childhoods and implications for educational justice. Throughout her career, Luttrell has directed community-based, university, and teacher inquiry projects dedicated to advancing social justice in and around schools and that promote innovative research and teaching practices, as well as curriculum development initiatives. She also serves as Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education.

María Elena Torre is the Founding Director of the Public Science Project and faculty member in Critical Psychology and Urban Education at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been engaged in critical participatory action research nationally and internationally for over 20 years with communities in neighborhoods, schools, prisons, and community-based organizations seeking structural justice. Co-editor of PAR EntreMundos: A Pedagogy of the Americas (Peter Lang Publishing), co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education (Teachers College Press), her work introduced the concept of ‘participatory contact zones’ to collaborative research, and she continues to explore how democratic methodologies, radical inclusion, and solidarity can inform a justice-based research praxis for the public good.

Michelle Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and founding co-director of The Public Science Project at the Graduate, a research collective of academics, educators, activists and community members dedicated to participatory action research rooted in social movements, designed to generate progressive policy, feed organizing campaigns, challenge academic notions of expertise, knowledge production and justice, and designed to provoke – often through a blend of science and the arts - what Maxine Greene would call “wide-awakeness.” In addition to being the author or co-author of more than 15 books and over 100 articles, for which she considers herself fortunate to sit and conduct research alongside young people for 30 years, she recently published JUST research: Widening the Methodological Imagination in Contentious Times (Teachers College Press, 2018) and authored a preface to the 2018 reprint of Maxine Greene’s Dialectic of Freedom. Lucky to have known Paolo Freire, and moved by the writings of WEB Du Bois in the U.S. and Linda Tuhiwai Smith in New Zealand, at the Public Science Project Michelle has been involved with a series of critical participatory studies with youth and elders, from across different racial, ethnic and social class backgrounds including “Changing Minds: The Impact of College in Prison on Women in a Maximum Security Facility” with Maria Elena Torre, Kathy Boudin, Iris Bowen, Judith Clark, Donna Hylton, Migdalia Martinez, Missy, Rosemarie Roberts, Melissa Rivera, Pam Smart and Debora Upegui - which is nationally recognized as the primary empirical basis for the contemporary college in prison movement, and among the primary empirical justifications for Governor Cuomo’s recent policy commitment to resuscitate college in prison. Michelle lives in Montclair and has been actively involved with Montclair Cares About Schools (MCAS).