I study how ideas become common sense.
Most people know me as a scholar of race and mathematics education. While my scholarship is situated in those fields, the questions that animate my work are broader: How do ideas become common sense? How do institutions sustain them? And how do new ways of thinking become possible?
I am interested in how ideas become so familiar that they begin to feel inevitable. My scholarship examines the histories, assumptions, and institutional practices that shape what we take for granted—and what becomes possible when we begin asking different questions.
Through research, writing, and public engagement, I develop concepts and distinctions that help people think more carefully about race, education, knowledge, and institutional life.
The Question that Guides My Work
Scholarship should not simply provide answers.
It should make new questions possible.
The question I keep returning to is this: How do certain ideas become so widely accepted that they come to organize institutions, shape professional practice, and define what appears possible?
That question has led me to study race, mathematics education, educational policy, and institutional life—not as separate topics, but as different sites where ideas become established as common sense. My research examines the historical, political, and intellectual conditions that make particular ways of thinking appear natural or inevitable. Whether I am writing about race, mathematics education, educational policy, or institutional life, I am ultimately interested in how knowledge is produced, how common sense is constructed, and how different futures become imaginable.
Across my scholarship, writing, and public engagement, I develop concepts and distinctions that help people see familiar problems in new ways.
Intellectual Commitments
I begin with questions.
I am less interested in defending established answers than in asking better questions.
I treat methods as ways of seeing.
Methods determine what becomes visible—and what remains hidden.
I study how ideas become common sense.
Ideas become institutions long before they become policies.
I write to expand what becomes thinkable.
Scholarship should widen our imagination.
Why This Work Matters
I believe that the questions we ask shape the futures we can imagine. When ideas become so familiar that they escape examination, they also begin to limit what we believe is possible. My work is an invitation to pause, to question what has come to seem inevitable, and to consider other ways of understanding our institutions and ourselves.
Professional Resources
For organizers, colleagues, media, and collaborators.
Continue the Conversation
Whether through scholarship, public speaking, or writing, my work is an invitation to think more carefully about race, education, and institutional life.