Season 3 Guests

David Stovall, Ph.D. is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His scholarship investigates critical questions of race, the the relationship between housing and education, and the intersection of race, place and school. In the attempt to bring theory to action, he works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus. In this episode, Dr. Stovall discusses some of the ideas that he feels are critical to becoming an antiracist educator and, more broadly, an antiracist community member who attends critically to questions of race and justice to create more accessible, welcoming campus communities.

Jennifer Rouse was elected to Virginia Beach City Council in 2022 to serve as the District 10 representative. Born and raised in Virginia Beach, Rouse earned her undergraduate degree in English literature and graduated magna cum laude from Virginia Wesleyan University. She then earned a master’s degree in sociology from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). While at VCU, she was awarded the prestigious L. Douglas Wilder Graduate Scholar Fellowship, which covered the full cost of tuition while also providing research opportunities focused on identifying the barriers and supports to serving low-income youth in Richmond. Rouse is an assistant professor of sociology and department chair for social sciences at Tidewater Community College. She has been recognized by Inside Business as one of Hampton Roads’ “Top 40 Under 40.” On city council, Rouse has been appointed to the Housing Advisory Board and Active Transportation Advisory Committee and is a liaison to the Minority Business Council, the Public Library Board, the Atlantic Park Community Development Authority, and the Something in the Water Festival.

JuliAnna Ávila is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in education in language, literacy, and sociocultural studies. In addition to five edited and coedited collections, she has published in Irish Educational Studies, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Teaching Education, English Journal, Literacy, Theory Into Practice, and Pedagogies. She is the recipient of the American Educational Research Association Steve Cahir Award for Research on Writing, the Edward B. Fry Book Award, and the Divergent Publication Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research.   Her latest research culminates in her new book, Fine Horses and Fair-Minded Riders: Modern Vaquero Horsemanship . It documents the learning and practice of Vaquero horsemanship, which has survived as a vibrant part of horse culture. In her study, Ávila first focused on participants in the southeastern United States before expanding to include their mentors from across the United States.

Dr.Ávila characterizes what she found as “a collapse of distance” between geographical and cultural boundaries, digital and physical spaces, and, most significantly, horses and humans.

Raúl Alberto Mora is an Associate Professor at the School of Education and Pedagogy at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín. He is a researcher at the Pedagogies and Didactics of Knowledge research group and chairs the award-winning Literacies in Second Languages Project (LSLP) research lab. He has served as visiting professor and scholar at the University of Białystok in Poland, Universidad de Guadalajara in México, and the University of West Bohemia in Czechia, as well as several universities in Colombia. He has guest lectured at universities in Colombia, Spain, Brazil, the United States, and Norway.

His current research explores second-language literacies in urban spaces and gaming communities, the pedagogical implementation of alternative literacies in second-language education, and the need for critical frameworks for English Language Teaching and plurilingualism in and from the Global South, topics he develops with his team at LSLP. He also studies how different languages are reinventing the notion of literacy as an epistemological and instrumental construct, being recognized as one of the key scholars in the field in Latin America. As a qualitative researcher, he is interested in the use of polyangulation as the way to envision data collection and analysis, especially when working with research teams, and has explored the use of gamification theory to rethink research design.

Dr. Mora holds a B.A. in Modern Language Education from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, an M.A. in Teacher Education, and a Ph.D. in Language and Literacy, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was awarded a Fulbright Graduate Scholarship to pursue his M.A. at Illinois and is a member of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi since 2009. He was selected as the 2019 winner of the Divergent Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research in recognition of his contribution as an international scholar to the field of literacy. The Literacies in Second Languages Project also received the Divergent Award for Excellence in Literacy in A Digital Age Research Implementation in 2023.

To learn more about Dr. Mora’s research with his team, visit https://lslp.org