The Stanford Center for Racial Justice (SCRJ or Center) is excited to announce the appointment of Professor Subini Ancy Annamma as Senior Fellow and Faculty Lead in Education, effective March 1, 2022. Professor Annamma will shape our understanding of key issues in education as it relates to racial and disability justice, and support the Center in developing a framework to advance education equity. As part of this effort, she will advise the Center in designing strategies to catalyze research and identify opportunities for improving practice, shifting policy, and building solutions-oriented partnerships with education stakeholders, including students, families and communities, school and district leaders, policymakers, advocates, scholars, and grassroots organizers.

Professor Annamma will also develop her ongoing research projects in collaboration with the Center, including her most recent project, the Walkout! Lab for Youth Justice, which is co-led by SCRJ Faculty Director Professor Ralph Richard Banks and formerly incarcerated youth. The Walkout! Lab is part of an initiative by the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity to establish racial equity action labs at Stanford, and is aimed at better understanding the population in youth incarceration and how education policies and practices influenced their paths. Researchers will survey incarcerated youth of color across the country to get a clearer picture of how education constrained or afforded their success and incarceration. “Kids, especially the ones who have been pushed to the margins, are in the best position to tell us what works and what doesn’t,” Annamma said. “In all of my work, I want their voices to be at the center.” Read more about the Walkout! Lab in the article, New Stanford Research Lab Explores Incarcerated Students’ Educational Paths.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Professor Annamma was a special education teacher in both public schools and youth prisons. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research examines how students are criminalized and how they experience criminalization through racism, ableism, and the interlocking nature of other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons. Throughout her work, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives can inform teacher and special education.

Annamma is the recipient of multiple awards. Her book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color and won the 2019 Association of Educational Service Agencies Critic’s Choice Book Award. She is a past Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, American Educational Research Association Division G Early Career Awardee, and Critical Race Studies in Education Associate Emerging Scholar recipient. Her research has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, and Race Ethnicity and Education.

It is with great joy and excitement that SCRJ welcomes Professor Annamma to our team!