Cindy Cruz
| Title | Assistant Professor |
| Division | Social Sciences Division |
| Department | Education Department |
| Affiliations | Feminist Studies Department, Latin American & Latino Studies |
| Phone | 831-459-1843 |
| FAX | 831-459-4618 |
| Office | McHenry Library, rm 3167 |
| Office Hours | Wednesdays 12:30-2pm and by appointment |
| Campus Mail Stop | Education Department |
| 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA |
Research Interests
U.S. Third World Feminisms and PedagogiesTestimonio
Schools and LGBTQ youth
Homeless youth
Youth and Violence
Latinos in the Education Pipeline
Schools to Prisons Policy
Violence against LGBTQ Communities
Decoloniality and Education
Biography, Education and Training
I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in both humanities and social sciences, with Chicano/Latino Studies, Anthropology and Education as my disciplinary homes. My dissertation “Testimonial and Street Youth Narratives: Toward an Epistemology of the Brown Body,” is an ethnography that examines the testimonials and narratives of urban queer youth. My research begins as a re-examination of the writings of U.S. Third World feminists, locating the queer brown body as central in an on-going practice of negotiation in which multiple, often opposing, ideas and ways of being are addressed, appropriated, and negotiated. Through interviews, direct and participant observations, and the close readings of student video and photographic narrative, I find that the queer body, fragmented by multiple identities and subjectivities, serves the purpose of deconstructing the racialized and gendered discourses inscripted upon young LGBTQ students.My new project looks at violence in and outside of the schoolyard and the schools-to-prisons pipeline, where I am developing a research proposal to look at the experiences of junior high and high school students in Salinas, California.
Honors, Awards and Grants
2012 Antonia I. Castaneda Prize, National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (Best New Article)2012 Article of the Year, Queer Studies Special Interest Group, AERA
Cornell University Provost’s Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2006-2008
Selected Publications
LGBTQ Street Youth Talk Back: A Meditation on Resistance and Witnessing. QSE: The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(5), 547-558.Notes on Immigration, Youth and Ethnographic Silence: Stories of LGBTQ Migrant Youth. Theory into Practice, v. 47, no. 1, 2008.
The locker room : Eroticism and exoticism in a polyphonic text (with Greg Tanaka). International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Volume 11, Issue 1, 137-153, 1998
Toward an epistemology of a brown body. QSE: The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, v. 14, n. 5, 657-669, 2001.
Cruz, C. and McLaren, P. (2004). Queer bodies and configurations: Toward a pedagogy of the body. In McLaren, P. (editor) Red Seminars: Radical Excursions into Educational Theory, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy. Creskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press.
Teaching Interests
Qualitative MethodologiesSchool-to-Prison Pipelines
Latinos and Education
LGBTQ issues in Schools
Feminist and Decolonial Methodologies
Race and Social Inequality
Social and Cultural Theory in Education
Courses Taught
Educ 256 Advanced Qualitative AnalysisEduc 135 Gender and Education
Educ 181 Race, Class, Culture in Education
Educ 207 Social and Cultural Foundations of Education
Educ 254 Critical and Alternative Epistemologies in Educational Research