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 book SLOW VIOLENCE, forthcoming in 2025 with St. Martin's Press/Macmillan, is a powerful exposé of the American public education system's indifference toward marginalized children and the "slow violence" that fashions schools into hostile work and learning environments.

Slow Violence was recently Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School and Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard 's 2024 Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize.

In 2017, I stepped inside a fourth-grade classroom in one of the nation’s largest majority-minority districts in Las Vegas, Nevada. I was there to conduct research on the lack of resources and budget cuts that regularly face public schools. However, a few months into my immersion, I recognized that that greatest impediment to students was the “slow violence” that preys on their minds, bodies, and spirits at the hands of teachers and administrators who are charged with their care. I continued to follow the children for multiple years. 

Slow Violence lays bare the routine indifference, racism, and verbal and emotional abuse and harassment that teachers and administrators perpetrate routinely against the most vulnerable children in our schools. 

Narrative driven and bolstered by latest breaking research in the social sciences, I go beyond timeworn discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline, funding, and achievement gaps to directly address what happens behind the closed doors of classrooms, introducing a compelling—and crucial—new perspective into the conversation about our education system.

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:
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• 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 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 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: [email protected] 
Twitter: @ranitaray1