January 2024

AERA has announced Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law, will deliver the Opening Plenary Keynote Lecture at the 2024 AERA Annual Meeting. The Opening Plenary will be held on Thursday, April 11, 2024, from 6:10 p.m. to 7:40 p.m. ET. It will take place in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Crenshaw’s lecture will be immediately followed by a conversation with AERA President Tyrone C. Howard and a moderated Q&A session with audience members.

“We are deeply honored to hear from Dr. Crenshaw at the 2024 Annual Meeting,” said Howard. “Her groundbreaking work on intersectionality and structural racism is strongly connected to the work we do as education researchers and practitioners, and we can all learn from her enlightening scholarship.”

“I can think of no other scholar more appropriate or better situated to align with this year’s theme, ‘Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action,’” said AERA Executive Director Felice Levine. “Her keynote will provide attendees with an opportunity to hear from a distinguished scholar outside our field whose research has significant implications for education research.”

Crenshaw is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a think tank that connects academics, activists and policymakers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality. She also serves as the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and as a Distinguished Professor of Law and the Promise Institute Chair in Human Rights at UCLA Law School.

Crenshaw is a widely cited scholar whose writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. She is the author of #SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence and co-author of Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School.  

Crenshaw’s lecture at the 2024 Annual Meeting represents AERA’s commitment to lateral learning for equity and justice, providing attendees an opportunity to hear from a distinguished scholar outside of the education research field whose work has significant implications for education, education research, and the trajectories the field pursues. Centering issues of equity and justice, these talks are designed to support education researchers in deepening their knowledge and understanding from the vantage of another discipline to contribute to advancing new, innovative, and more robust research programs that advance equity and justice.