Racial Justice Fellow (2026-27)
Prior to her doctoral studies, Subini Ancy Annamma was a special education teacher in both public schools and youth prisons. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization via processes that animate entrenched inequities while recognizing the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, the interlocking with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons.
Further, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives and ingenuity can inform teachers and special education. Dr. Annamma’s book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization (Routledge, 2018) focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color and has won the 2019 AESA Critic’s Choice Book Award & 2018 NWSA Alison Piepmeier Book Prize. Her current research projects are examining the overrepresentation of Black youth in suspensions and special education in public schools, teaching a high school Ethnic Studies class that centers liberatory education for youth who have been pushed to the margins in schools, and interviewing incarcerated youth across the country. Dr. Annamma is a past Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, AERA Division G Early Career Awardee, Critical Race Studies in Education Associate Emerging Scholar recipient, Western Social Science Association's Outstanding Emerging Scholar, and AERA Minority Dissertation Awardee. Dr. Annamma’s work has been published in scholarly journals such as American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, Review of Research in Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Theory Into Practice, Race Ethnicity and Education, Qualitative Inquiry, among others. Dr. Annamma’s work has also been funded by the The Ford Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.
Fellowship Project: The project’s aim is to describe and analyze the education trajectories and lived experiences of incarcerated youth to provide lessons in abolitionist thought and action. Its central claim is that abolitionists, and those committed to justice in education, must listen to and learn from incarcerated youth. Annamma has interviewed 150 incarcerated Youth of Color across the country. She argues that incarcerated youth–the majority of whom are Black, Brown, Queer, and/or Disabled and face intersecting systems of oppression–are brilliant; yet their gifts are being squandered by a society that punishes them for existing in an inequitable world. Annamma centers their experiences in any revisioning of society, including transforming multiple institutions in order to move our society closer to justice. She tears down the barbed wire and throws open the doors of youth prisons, so others can witness how they narrate their own experiences, and describe solutions that are both powerful and practical.
Fellowship Project: The project’s aim is to describe and analyze the education trajectories and lived experiences of incarcerated youth to provide lessons in abolitionist thought and action. Its central claim is that abolitionists, and those committed to justice in education, must listen to and learn from incarcerated youth. Annamma has interviewed 150 incarcerated Youth of Color across the country. She argues that incarcerated youth–the majority of whom are Black, Brown, Queer, and/or Disabled and face intersecting systems of oppression–are brilliant; yet their gifts are being squandered by a society that punishes them for existing in an inequitable world. Annamma centers their experiences in any revisioning of society, including transforming multiple institutions in order to move our society closer to justice. She tears down the barbed wire and throws open the doors of youth prisons, so others can witness how they narrate their own experiences, and describe solutions that are both powerful and practical.