Professor of Educational Studies, Educational Studies
Anita Chikkatur (she/her/hers) attended public middle and high schools in New York City and identifies deeply as a New Yorker. She received her BA in Sociology and Education at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. Anita then taught English at a junior high school in a small town in Japan for two years. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Education, Culture and Society program at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Her research and teaching interests include student and teacher perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality and issues of diversity and difference in educational institutions.
From 2018–2022, she was the co-principal investigator on an AmeriCorps-funded participatory action research (PAR) project in Faribault, Minnesota, collaborating with youth, parents, teachers, and administrators. She is currently the principal investigator of a second AmeriCorps funded grant that builds on the networks developed from the first grant and focuses on Youth Participatory Action Research in five Minnesota school districts. Anita is an organizer for the Education for Liberation Network, Minnesota chapter and a member of The Spoilers Collective, a group of academics of color, who produce a podcast called “The Drip” where they discuss books by authors of color.