About:

Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, and writer. Her work addresses the narratives that facilitate societal structures.With a background in sociology, she researches and teaches about education as a site of social reproduction and as a potential site for transformation. She is an Associate Professor of Education at Boston College and works extensively with societally marginalized youth and teacher activists. Prior to working in the academy, Professor Patel was a journalist, a teacher, and a state-level policymaker. Leigh Patel, also published under Lisa Patel Stevens, is the award-winning author of Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability (Routledge), Youth Held at the Border: Immigration, Education and the Politics of Inclusion (Teachers College Press), co-author of Critical Literacy: Context, Research, and Praxis in the K-12 Classroom (Sage) and co-editor of ReConstructing the Adolescent: Sign, Symbol and Body (Peter Lang Publishers). In addition to dozens of academic articles and chapters, her writing has also been featured in media outlets including Beacon Broadside, The Feminist Wire, Racialicious.com and HuffPost Live. She is a national board member of Education for Liberation, a long-standing organization dedicated to transformative education for marginalized populations.