Kristen L. Buras

Kristen Buras spent two decades as an education professor at Emory University then Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her work continues as an antiracist scholar-activist in the Deep South. She is cofounder and director of the New Orleans-based Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, a coalition with Black educational and cultural groups that melds community-based research and organizing for racial justice. Buras has written multiple books on urban educational policy, including Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance and What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School. She is coauthor of Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance and coeditor of The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles with Michael Apple. She is regularly contacted by school board members, teachers, parent groups, education activists, and journalists across the nation for her expertise on school district takeovers, privatization, and the effects on local communities. She has published in Harvard Educational Review, Peabody Journal of Education, Race Ethnicity and Education, and elsewhere, spoken by invitation at universities such as Columbia, Dillard, Fordham, Loyola, Harvard, and Tulane, and participated in community forums in cities affected by neoliberal reforms. Buras was granted the Distinguished Scholar-Activist Award by Critical Educators for Social Justice of the American Educational Research Association.

Website: www.kristenburas.com

Email Kristen Buras at: kburas@gsu.edu or kb.usgrc@gmail.com

photo: © Alexandra Zak Photography