Research
Restorying, spatial reclamation, and equitable schooling
My research examines how children, youth, and their communities use literacy, storytelling, and collective meaning-making to protest spatial, ideological, and political constraints on schooling.
I understand literacy practices as inherently spatialized and embodied. My research agenda has three interconnected areas, described below.
Restorying and spatial reclamation
This line of work studies children's and youths' restorying practices as acts of spatial reclamation. Drawing on narrative inquiry and action-based methodologies, I have worked alongside children as they explore places through walking tours, heart maps, play, photography, and focus groups. My dissertation, Narrating Neighborhoods: Children Restorying Historically Segregated Places, studied how children restory historically segregated places. With Amy Walker, I extend this work through nexus analysis.
Equitable schooling in contested times
This line of work studies how equitable schooling is co-constructed in politically historicized contexts, including book banning, censorship, and white Christian nationalism. With colleagues, I have examined how the parents' rights movement frames critical race theory as a danger to children, and how Moms for Liberty bans and promotes books. Our co-authored book, Cultivating Equity Literacy in Schools and Communities, uses multigenerational collaborative ethnography to examine school choice, decision-making, and the role literacy plays in advancing equity in schools and communities.
Community-based literacies
This line of work asks how stakeholders use community-based literacies to resist and restory deficit narratives and to design equitable educational futures. It connects my research to my community work in Cortland County, where I founded and developed Crown Table, a grassroots, community-based network.
The plan for my community initiatives has three phases. First, sustain the initiatives already under way. Second, integrate them into my teaching and research. Third, formalize them as a community-based Literacy Laboratory.
Current project
Leveraging Literacy: A Community-Centered Approach to Building an Exploratory Literacy Lab in Cortland County
An IRB-approved research project, currently ongoing.
Foundations in play and making
During my doctoral work at Indiana University, I worked with Karen Wohlwend and colleagues on research that studied play, maker literacies, and playshops with K–16 learners. It appears in Teachers College Record, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, and the edited volume Playful Methods: Engaging the Unexpected in Literacy Research (Routledge, 2022).
Methods
I have been invited to teach these approaches to other researchers, including a 2024 talk on spatial methodologies at the 7th Interdisciplinary Symposium on Qualitative Methods at the University of South Florida.