May 2024

AERA has announced six recipients of its 2024-25 Minority Dissertation Fellowship and two additional Minority Dissertation Travel Awards. In a highly selective process, AERA’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program awards fellowships and travel awards to members of racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in education research, and offers mentoring and guidance toward the completion of their doctoral studies. An important aim of the fellowship is to enhance the racial and ethnic diversity of faculty, scholars, and researchers across the education research field.

All new Minority Dissertation Fellows and Travel Awardees are in the final stages of their dissertation studies across a broad range of education research topics, such as LGBTQ issues in schools, pedagogy, and undocumented students in college. Many of these studies focus on minoritized racial and ethnic groups in education and schools. The awardees frame their research around a range of disciplines and subfields of education research, including higher education, psychometrics, and psychology.

Minority Dissertation Fellows and Travel Awardees 2024–2025

Name		Institution	Dissertation Title
	monét cooper	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	Between Freedom and Capture: Quare Youths’ Literacies of Everyday Aliveness in the Un/care of School
	Andrew del Calvo*	University of Pennsylvania	Writing Civic Histories
	Cristina Mendez	University of California, Berkeley	Reclaiming Mam Language and Culture: Women’s Activist Pedagogies and Literacies across Guatemala, México, and the United States
	David Morales	Stanford University	Political and Pedagogical Possibilities of Education Movement-Building at the Ends of Empire
	Samuela Mouzaoir*	Michigan State University	The Prophet and the Dream: Towards a Pedagogy of Black Futurities
	Camila Polanco	University of Delaware	The Children’s Interpersonal Mattering at School Scale: A Psychometric Exploration
	Ana Vasan	University of Chicago	Political Pedagogies: Educators’ Roles in Student Resistance, Accommodation, and Compliance
	Siyue Lena Wang	University of California, Los Angeles	Becoming the “Mystical Unicorn”: Understanding the Racialized Illegality Experiences of Undocumented Asian College Students in California

*Minority Dissertation Travel Awardees

The program awards dissertation fellows a $25,000 stipend to complete their dissertation research and training. Travel awardees receive funds to attend the AERA Annual Meeting. All awardees will present their work in an invited poster session during the 2025 Annual Meeting in Denver, where they will meet with the Minority Dissertation Fellowship Selection Committee and other senior scholars as part of a mentoring and career development workshop.

Recent fellows have published their research in peer-reviewed journals and are now in postdoctoral and faculty positions at major research institutions, including Emory University, the University of Florida, the University of Oklahoma, and Vanderbilt University.

AERA Council established the Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program in Education Research in 1991 to support outstanding graduate students as they develop their research and begin their careers. AERA and its leadership are committed to providing a program of capacity-building and training opportunities for scholars from racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in education research.

“We are enthusiastic about the promise and potential of these students’ dissertation research,” said George L. Wimberly, AERA director of professional development and diversity officer. “These fellows and travel awardees are some of the strongest graduate students doing education research.”

This is a highly competitive program that funds scientific research on topics across education, school and schooling processes, and student experiences. The selection committee seeks proposals to bring grounded, insightful, and informed perspectives to the field. AERA will begin accepting the next cycle of proposals in late summer with an October 31, 2024, application deadline. For further details about the program, please email the AERA Fellowships Program at fellowships@aera.net.