Event

Natasha Warikoo, Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard University

Each of Natasha Warikoo’s projects analyzes the cultural influences on the ways in which groups in society strive for status, and they all lie at the intersection of race, immigration, culture, inequality, and education.Her book, Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City (University of California Press 2011), analyzes how youth cultures among children of immigrants are related to their orientations toward schooling through ethnographic, interview, and survey data in diverse New York and London high schools. Balancing Acts won the Thomas and Znaneicki Best Book Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association.

Warikoo will spend the 2013-14 year as a fellow at Russell Sage Foundation, where she will write a book about the perspectives of students attending elite British and American universities on merit in admissions, inequality, and race. This project compares how national contexts, university practices, and race shape students’ meaning-making related to diversity and excellence.

Her work has been published in scholarly journals (American Journal of Education; Poetics; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Racial and Ethnic Studies; and Review of Educational Research), books, and newspapers (Education Week, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post), and she has won grants and awards from American Sociological Association, the British Academy, the National Science Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University, and previously taught at University of London's School of Advanced Study. Prior to completing her Ph.D. she was a teacher in New York City's public schools for four years.