Name: Faith Northern
Email: faith.northern@nyu.edu
Program: Sociology of Education
Research Interests: Sociology of Education; History of Education; Sociology of Immigration; Race, Racialization and Ethnicity Studies; Social Identification Formation; Urban Education; Afro-Caribbean/African Diaspora-centered Research; Postcolonial and Colonial Theory; Historical and Comparative Analyses
Principal Advisor(s): Dr. Mercy Agyepong (Dissertation Committee Chair, NYU); Dr. Linsey Edwards (Dissertation Committee Member, NYU); Dr. Kimberly Williams-Brown (Dissertation Committee Member, Vassar College)
Research description/bio: Faith Northern (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology of Education program at NYU Steinhardt. Faith is first-generation, low-income (FGLI) scholar and alumna of Vassar College, where she graduated with her B.A. in Biochemistry, Educational Studies, and History. Her academic and activist journey began through work with nonprofit organizations in Greece and New York, and deepened through teaching experiences in K-12 across NY and NJ, and research on race education in both K–12 and higher education settings.
Her interdisciplinary research traces how race, empire, and social control shape educational experiences and systems across time and space, with a specific focus on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Her undergraduate thesis examined archival data connected to 19th-century British education reforms, showing how imperial policy positioned both Afro-Jamaicans and working-class Britons as subjects of moral regulation and state control, critiquing colonial narratives of improvement and exposing how liberal education policy marginalized the colonized and the British poor alike.
Building on this historical foundation, her dissertation investigates how Afro-Caribbean college students in the U.S. navigate antiblackness, cultural misrecognition, and educational exclusion. Using a Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods (SEEM) design—including surveys, interviews, and guided journaling—her project theorizes “diasporic navigation” as a response to both structural violence and cultural erasure. The study is grounded in the Diasporic Navigation Framework, which synthesizes theories of antiblackness, racial and ethnic identity development, and community cultural wealth to examine how students resist, disidentify, and persist within hostile academic terrains.
Faith’s scholarship sits at the intersections of educational sociology, critical historiography, and diasporic theory. Whether analyzing colonial archives or contemporary student narratives, her work is driven by a commitment to understanding how systems of power operate through education—and how racialized communities survive, contest, and reimagine those systems across generations.
Selected Awards, Publications, and Presentations:
PRESENTATIONS
Northern, F. (2025, April). “Between Borders and Belonging: Afro-Caribbean Students and the Plurality of Blackness in Higher Education.” Paper Presentation (Panel 4: Migration and Plural Identities) at Sociologies, In Plural Graduate Conference.
Williams Brown, K., Northern, F., Kallman, C. (2024, April). “Disposable Teachers: Deconstructing the politics of care enacted by Afro-Caribbean Women Teachers.” Roundtable Discussion (SIG: Research Focus on Black Education) at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Philadelphia, PA.
Williams Bown, K., Northern, F., Johnson, N. (2022, April). “Maroon Epistemologies: Afro-Caribbean Women Teachers.” Roundtable Discussion (SIG: Caribbean and African Studies in Education) at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Diego, CA.
PUBLICATIONS
Articles
Williams Brown, K., Northern, F., & Kallman, C. (2024). Fugitive Care: The Politics of Care Enacted by Afro-Caribbean Women Teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 0(0).
Sarosh, A., Kwong, S. M., Jensen, S. O., Northern, F., Walton, W. G., Eakes, T. C., Redinbo, M. R., Firth, N., & McLaughlin, K. J. (2023). pSK41/pGO1-family conjugative plasmids of Staphylococcus aureus encode a cryptic repressor of replication. Plasmid, 102708.
Book Chapters
Northern, F., Khan, A., Rao, S., Weil, A., Hantzopoulos, M. (2023). Finding Place: Strengthening Pedagogical Practices on Forced Migration Through Interpersonal Understanding in Higher Education. In: Murray, B., Brill-Carlat, M., Höhn, M. (eds) Migration, Displacement, and Higher Education. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
GRANTS AND AWARDS
Summer 2025 Steinhardt Doctoral Research and Travel Grant, New York University ($1,200)