Catherine Bell

Founders Fellow, Sociology of Education

Catherine Bell has already fulfilled Shakespeare's observation that "one man in his time plays many roles." She has been a student, a poet, an organizer, an oral historian, a volunteer coordinator, a teacher, an educational consultant, and a youth worker. "Through it all, I have come to realize that I approach the world as a social scientist," she observes. "I am consistently contextualizing and re-contextualizing nearly everything I experience, creating and refining an analysis, a good thing in the classroom, a bad thing at parties. For the past five years, I have grown to see the world through the overlapping lenses of race, class, gender and power relations. This has brought me on a journey from a mainstream feminist organization, to suburban Hebrew school classrooms, to an inner city youth center to a grassroots organization in Accra, Ghana."

Bell earned a B.A. in English and French from Amherst. She is pursuing a doctoral degree to develop a strong foundation in sociological methodology, and to find "the guidance, rigor, and historical and theoretical background to make satisfactory sense of the systems I see around me."

Bell hopes to find ways to address issues of social justice in an educational context by pursuing the following questions: "In the context of American society, how do people develop an understanding of political institutions and their potential role within them. How do they and how don't they become politicized and see themselves as part of their political reality, agents of their own future? How do gender, race and class come into play here? How are movements for social change built or nourished by educational policies and programs?" She is also considering white identity, suburban educational culture, and education in prisons as future areas of study.

Written by Ed Goodgold