Ranita Ray, Ph.D.
Writer & Sociologist

I am an author, ethnographer, and sociologist. I research, write, and speak primarily about teacher racism; K-12 schools as hostile institutions; gendered racial violence in education; social mobility and racialized poverty; and reproductive justice. I am currently Associate Professor and Baca Zinn Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. 

My 2018 book THE MAKING OF A TEENAGE SERVICE CLASS: POVERTY AND MOBILITY IN AN AMERICAN CITY won the following accolades:

• Winner. 2018. C. Wright Mills Award.
• Winner. 2020 Pacific Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarship Award.
• Honorable Mention. 2019. ASA Race, Gender, and Class Section Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award.
• Finalist. 2020. ASA Sociology of Education Bourdieu Best Book Award

In this book,  I recount the three years I spent with sixteen economically marginalized young Black and brown people to challenge common wisdom that focusing on "risk behaviors" such as drug use, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood is the key to ameliorating poverty in Black and brown communities. Instead, I show how this strategy unleashes racialized class violence on Black and brown youth and is not a pathway to economic justice. 

My next book, VIOLENT SCHOOLS, is under contract with St. Martin's Press/Macmillan. The book is an unflinching exposé of the American public education system’s indifference toward Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and economically marginalized children and the "slow violence" that fashions schools into hostile work and learning environments, based on three-year immersion in one of the nation's largest school district combined with interviews, and archival research. You can read a piece in Slate based on this research here. 

An academic journal article from this research, "School as a Hostile Institution: How Black and Immigrant Girls of Color Experience the Classroom," published in Gender & Society, recently received the following accolades:

• 2023 American Sociological Association, The Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender’s Distinguished Article Award.
• 2023 Society for the Study of Social Problems, Arlene Kaplan Daniels Paper Award.
• 2023 American Sociological Association, The Section on Race, Gender, and Class’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Article Award. Honorable Mention.
  

​My work has received awards, honors, and funding from American Sociological Association, Society For the Study of Social Problems, Pacific Sociological Association, National Science Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network. In 2019-2020 I was a NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. I serve on editorial boards of Sociology of Education and Qualitative Sociology.

CONTACT ME:
Email: ranitaray@unm.edu 
Twitter: @ranitaray1