Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides
Assistant Professor, Special Education

Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides received her Ph.D. from New York University in Sociology of Education with a focus on Special Education. Her body of work is interdisciplinary. It spans the fields of special education, disability studies, sociology of education, race and ethnic studies, educational leadership, and policy and law. She is focused on understanding how schools are both sites of educational opportunity and marginalization for non-dominant students. She examines how notions of equity, access, and opportunity are constructed in policy and law; how educational policies and laws impact long standing educational inequities; and how intersectional identities relate to the organizational, social, historical, and cultural contexts of schools and the teaching and learning process. In her work she destabilizes the notion that educator’s good intentions, civil rights discourse, and legal procedural protections are sufficient for assuring equity in education. She also focuses on understanding how medicalized and deficit notions of disability are embedded in educational policies and laws and how these ideological constructs normalize and individualize racialized educational inequities. She published her first book with Teachers College Press in 2018 in the Disability, Culture, and Equity Series. The book is entitled “Does Compliance Matter in Special Education: IDEA and the Hidden Inequities of Practice.” She has also published in Theory into Practice, Review of Research in Education, and Teachers College Record among other journals. She has served as Co-PI on a William T. Grant Foundation small grant and she currently serves as a Program Co-Chair for the Disability Studies in Education (DSE) Special Interest Group (SIG) for the American Educational Research Association (AERA).