Social Justice in Education Award


Social Justice in Education Award

2024 Award Recipient  


Leah P. Hollis
Pennsylvania State University

Dr. Leah Patricia Hollis is the 2024 Social Justice in Education Award recipient. Her program of research and practice focuses on issues of equity, inclusion, and social justice with particular attention to bullying in the academy. She examines the contexts and consequences of structural barriers that inform the trajectories and success of Black women and other women of color in higher education. Her three recent publications: Black women, intersectionality and workplace bullying (2022); Human resource perspectives on workplace bullying in higher education: Understanding vulnerable employees' experiences (2021); and The coercive community college: Bullying and its costly impact on the mission to serve underrepresented populations (2016), uncover a new intellectual and scholarly space around how bullying intersects with gender and race in the academy. Her scholarship enhances developing and existing theoretical frameworks, uncovers nascent knowledge about the unfavorable consequences of bullying, and has been used to inform anti-bullying policies and practices across university campuses. Dr. Hollis is an excellent model of a scholar whose work embodies social justice in action.

Established in 2004, the Social Justice in Education Award honors an individual who has advanced social justice through education research and exemplified the goal of linking education research to social justice. The winner of the award will be invited to give the Social Justice Lecture at the following Annual Meeting. The AERA Social Justice Committee is charged by AERA Council with serving as the selection committee for this award.         

Past Recipients

2023 - Marc Lamont Hill
2022 - Tyrone C. Howard
2021 - Sharon Fries-Britt
2020 - David Stovall
2019 - James L. Moore III
2018 - Sylvia Hurtado
2017 - Estela Mara Bensimon
2016 - Kevin Kumashiro
2015 - Gloria J. Ladson-Billings
2014 - Michael A. Olivas
2013 - Jeannie Oakes
2012 - Daniel G. Solorzano
2011 - William C. Ayers
2010 - Carl A. Grant
2009 - Christine E. Sleeter
2008 - Sonia Nieto
2007 - Gary A. Orfield
2006 - Gwendolyn C. Baker
2005 - Jacqueline J. Irvine
2004 - James A. Banks