Rebecca Alexander

Education Studies

Rebecca Alexander received her PhD in Social and Cultural Studies in Education from UC Berkeley in 2012 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University.  Her research focuses on segregated schools and communities and the ways in which young people and their families use processes of border-crossing and border-making to grapple with social, spatial and educational dispossession.  Drawing on themes of educational sovereignty, decoloniality, and illegality she looks at how communities contest marginalization and forced assimilation and work to defend and sustain critical educational spaces and frameworks.  Recent publications include “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn in Research and Praxis: Advancing New Understandings of the Community-School Relation in Lationa/o Parent Involvement” and “Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involvement in Schools: What Teacher Educators Need to Know.”  Her work in progress focuses on undocumented children and parents and looks specifically at border crossing as a form of parent involvement.