Claudia García-Louis

Dr. Claudia García-Louis is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Texas San Antonio. She draws from over six years of student affairs experience in order to bridge theory to practice and back again. Her core values as an educator are to uphold social justice, equity, and respect at all times with an emphasis on the mastery of knowledge. She has facilitated numerous social justice workshops and consistently mediates difficult conversations within her classroom. Through her research, she seeks to disrupt deficit thinking about communities of color, minoratized populations, and underrepresented students. Her goals are to expand the definitions of Latinidad and Blackness in higher education, to make a critical contribution to a newly formed line of inquiry that explores the educational experiences of AfroLatinxs, and to conduct research that highlights Latinx heterogeneity through an asset based perspective.

Current Work:

Dr. García-Louis' scholarship centers around three main areas: the first is about expanding the definitions of Latinidad and Blackness. In the US, the social construction of race and ethnicity have reinforced a Black-White binary that erroneously authenticates race/ethnicity as a biological fact. Her research challenges the classification of individuals into boxes, specifically focusing on Latinx heterogeneity. Social scientists have racialized Latinx as mestizo, despite us being racially diverse, which has led to the oversight of intra-group racial diversity. AfroLatinxs are among the most neglected "sub-groups" in social research. She want to understand how race, culture, language, phenotype, panethnicity, and other identities impact their sense of belonging (and ultimately persistence) in higher education.

The second line of inquiry consists of highlighting the stories of resiliency, tenacity, courage, and persistence of Latina junior tenure-track faculty members who are also mothers. Women of color as a whole continue to represent only a marginal fraction of tenured faculty. Dr. García-Louis' research seeks to uncover how Latina junior tenure-track faculty members successfully navigate mothering, academic work, and personal life. It is her hope that through asset based research we move away from seeing them as victims and highlight the many ways in which they thrive in academe. Further, she hopes that this scholarship will help program chairs and college deans develop support programs that will facilitate the tenure-track journeys of all women with children.

Finally, the third line of inquiry has to do with methodological contributions. Dr. García-Louis cannot count the number of times she has read methodological texts and felt limited by the methods. She had employed a number of methodological changes to her research that is best suited for her populations of interest (minoratized, people of color, and vulnerable populations), the changes have proven to yield much more rich data.  Dr. García-Louis is in the process of writing two manuscripts related to this topic. In addition, she has coined the term Latina critical pedagogical activism which refers to the many ways WOC - and specifically - Latina faculty engage in critical and activist practices to connect with their students and effect theoretical change. It is a pedagogy built upon her personal and professional experiences and informed by what the students need as well as contemporary issues.

Research Area Keyword(s):

Afrolatinx; Latinx heterogeneity; colorism; sense of belonging; persistence; first generation