Maisha Winn

Maisha T. Winn will spend her CASBS year examining how publications produced by Independent Black Institutions (IBIs) established in the late 1960s and early 1970s engaged the literary imagination with Black Cultural Nationalism. During the Black Arts and Black Power Movements, concerned Black parents, educators, and artists created IBIs initially as a reaction to harm and wrongdoing in U.S. schools but later transitioned to reimagining the education process for Black children and their families. Winn will be working on a monograph focused on an analysis of publications produced by a Chicago-based IBI, Institute of Positive Education, and how Black institution builders throughout the U.S leveraged their publications to participate in future/s making endeavors for Black Americans.

Winn is a language, literacy, and culture scholar and the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis where she co-founded and serves as the faculty director for the Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Davis, Winn was the Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair in Literacy in the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research examines the literate trajectories of African American children and youth including ethnographies of participatory literacy communities and historical ethnography focused on contributions of the Black Arts Movement. She is the author of several books including Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2008)(published under “Fisher”); Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Teachers College Press, 2011); Justice on Both Sides (Harvard Education Press, 2020), as well as articles published in journals such as Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Journal of African American History; Mind, Culture & Activity; International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Race, Ethnicity, and Education; and Journal of Futures Studies.