Name: Laura Assanmal Peláez
Email: lma502@nyu.edu
Program: Sociology of Education
Research Interests: immigration & education, undocumented youth, students at risk of deportation, urban schooling, teaching in carceral contexts
Principal Advisor(s): L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy
Research Description/Bio:
Laura is a PhD candidate in Sociology of Education at NYU Steinhardt's School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Prior to joining Steinhardt, she received a BA in Social Research and Public Policy with a minor in Political Science from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2021.
Born and raised in Honduras, Laura is an educator, youth worker, urban ethnographer, and doctoral student. She studies deportability: how it moves through classrooms, shapes what students believe is possible for their futures, and follows them home. Her dissertation follows the lives of undocumented youth in active deportation proceedings, including asylum-seeking students living in New York City shelters, and traces how schools become entangled with the broader immigration enforcement system.
Prior to starting her PhD, Laura supported Engaging Latino Communities for Education (ENLACE) at the Bronx Institute at CUNY Lehman College. She has also served as a volunteer teaching assistant at Brooklyn International High School.
Laura is a member of the adjunct faculty at the Education Studies Program at NYU Steinhardt and the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a graduate researcher at the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, and an editor at the Voices in Urban Education Journal (VUE), housed at NYU. She is also a professor with NYU's Prison Education Program, teaching incarcerated students at Wallkill Correctional Facility.
Laura is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow. Her dissertation is further supported by grants awarded by the American Sociological Association and the American Education Research Association.
Outside her academic work, Laura is a salsa dancer, community organizer, and co-leads archival and community history projects documenting Young Lords history in East Harlem.
Selected Awards, Publications, and Presentations:
AWARDS
- Assanmal, L., & Mangual Figueroa, A. (forthcoming). Bringing Immigrant Solidarity Into the Classroom: Accompaniment as Practice. Theory Into Practice. [Special issue: Undocumented K-16 Schooling in the Landscape of Anti-Immigrant State-Sanctioned Violence]
- 2026 NaEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship
- 2026 ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
- 2026 American Educational Research Association Minority Fellowship (awarded)
- 2025 Steinhardt Outstanding Doctoral Student Teaching Award
- 2025 NYU Latinx Project Public Humanities Fellowship
- 2025 UC Berkeley Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative Junior Scholars Symposium
- 2024 Doctoral Fellowship in Urban Practice, Urban Democracy Lab (UDL) at NYU Gallatin