T. Elon Dancy II (PI) 
Sabina Vaught (Co-PI)
Dr. Vaught’s research considers carcerality and liberatory knowledge movements broadly and the race-gender labor and conquest relationships among schools, prisons, and insurgent communities specifically. In her scholarly work, Dr. Vaught draws on knowledge traditions that help make sense of insurgent and counterinsurgent movements: feminisms, the Black radical tradition, Indigenous studies, and legal studies/Critical Race Theory. Her most recent book, The School-Prison Trust, co-authored with Bryan Brayboy and Jeremiah Chin (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), is an interrogation of the conquest relations between schools and prisons, and Indigenous practices of refusal and self-determination.
Christy McGuire (Coordinator)
Dr. McGuire is the Community Engagement Program Manager at the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned a Ph.D. in cognitive and experimental psychology from Georgia Tech in 2001, and an Ed.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021. For over 20 years, Christy has worked and volunteered in a wide variety of education-related spaces. She is particularly interested in working with educators around discussing race and racism with their students, and more broadly exploring the ways that knowledge and beliefs inform and influence teachers’ pedagogical practices.
Chris Wright (Educator)
Chris is a PhD student in the Urban Education program at The University of Pittsburgh. His research centers Black spaces as geographic sights of political struggle and worldmaking. He engages patterns of Black displacement, Black organized struggle, antiblackness and social death.
Chris holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from The University of Oklahoma.
Martez Files (Educator)
Dr. Martez Files is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Teacher Education at the University of Pittsburgh. His previous experiences include teaching high school history and social studies, serving as an adjunct professor of African American studies, and the Diversity Enhancement Program fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Recently, he completed an appointment as a Graduation Coach for a $60-million grant, GEAR UP Alabama, which worked to remove barriers to higher education for rural youth in Alabama. Before coming to Pitt, he was the Program Coordinator for African American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at UAB. Dr. Files has a Ph.D. in Educational Studies in Diverse Populations with a concentration in Metropolitan Education Studies from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His dissertation “Mothering Ourselves to Wholeness” is a project that uncovers the myriad ways Black mothers in life and literature have forged communal wholeness, protected the most vulnerable, and healed harm outside and within communities. He holds a M.A.T. in His/SS with an emphasis on social justice from Brown University, and graduated cum laude from UAB, where he earned a B.A. in African-American Studies and B.A. in History. He is a prominent activist and organizer in Alabama, whose work focuses on mental health, politics, education, communal care, and police accountability.
Janelle Levy (Educator)
Dr. Levy is a Post-Doctoral Associate in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology Department at the University of California, Irvine. Janelle’s research interests include anti-Black nation-building ideologies, post-colonial elites, Creolization, and the Anglo-phone Caribbean. Her current research focuses on the politics of identity and aspiration among elite Jamaican youth through their schooling. By examining the aspiration towards an international education, both domestically and abroad, her work aims to explore how elite youth come to form, navigate, and employ their Jamaican identity vis-à-vis education. Particularly, her work is interested in the identities of mixed and non-Black Jamaicans as it relates to the Jamaican imaginary of a Black nation.
Valerie Kinloch (Previous PI)
Dr. Valerie Kinloch began her tenure as the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Education in July 2017. Under her leadership, the School adopted a forward-thinking mission-vision that places equity, justice, and innovation at its core. This mission-vision encourages faculty, staff, and students to work together to always ignite learning, strive for well-being for all, and disrupt and transform inequitable educational structures. Dean Kinloch is a nationally known educator and author whose scholarship focuses on the literacy, language, culture, and community engagements of youth and adults, both inside and outside of schools. Prior to joining the Pitt School of Education, Dean Kinloch was a faculty member and Associate Dean at The Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology. Before Ohio State, Dean Kinloch taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the University of Houston-Downtown.