Leigh Patel

Dr. Patel is an Associate Professor of Education at Boston College and works extensively with societally marginalized youth and teacher activists. Prior to working in the academy, she was a journalist, a teacher, and a state-level policymaker. Across all of these experiences, her focus has been on the ways that education structures opportunities in society and the stories that are told about those opportunities. Her daily work has been with youth who are marginalized through those structures.

Professor Patel, also published under Lisa Patel Stevens, is the author of  Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability (Routledge), Youth Held at the Border: Immigration, Education and the Politics of Inclusion (Teachers College Press), co-author of Critical Literacy: Context, Research, and Praxis in the K-12 Classroom (Sage) and co-editor of ReConstructing the Adolescent: Sign, Symbol and Body (Peter Lang Publishers).   She has authored dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters and has been a consistent voice in educational policymaking and policy analysis over a number of years. Her writing has also been featured in media outlets including Beacon Broadside, The Feminist Wire, Racialicious.com and HuffPost Live. She is a national board member of Education for Liberation, a long-standing organization dedicated to transformative education for marginalized populations. 

Leigh blogs at http://www.lisapatel.org/.