Name: Laura Assanmal Peláez
Email: lma502@nyu.edu
Program: Sociology of Education
Research Interests: Immigration & education, Central & South American youth, asylum-seekers in the NYC public school system, and students with interrupted formal education
Principal Advisor(s): L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy
Research Description/Bio: Laura Assanmal Peláez 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 Bachelor of Arts 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, community organizer, and doctoral student. In her work, Laura explores the experiences of Latinx, asylum-seeking, South and Central American youth in New York City, with a focus on students experiencing housing insecurity. Her research explores how immigrant, unhoused, and mixed-status family students develop strategies to navigate NYC’s school and shelter system.
Prior to starting her PhD, Laura has supported Engaging Latino Communities for Education (ENLACE) at the Bronx Institute at CUNY Lehman College. Laura has also served as a volunteer teaching assistant at Brooklyn International High School. In addition, Laura helped co-found the New Neighbors Network, a mutual aid collective dedicated to uplifting, and advocating with newcomer, unhoused youth living in city shelters in Manhattan Valley.
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 the Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and an editor at the Voices in Urban Education Journal (VUE).
Selected Awards, Publications, and Presentations:
AWARDS
- 2025 Steinhardt Outstanding Doctoral Student Teaching Award
- 2025 NYU Latinx Project Public Humanities Fellowship
- 2025 UC Berkeley's Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative Junior Scholars Symposium
- 2025 NYU Faculty First Look Fellow
- 2024-2025 Doctoral Fellowship in Urban Practice awarded by The Urban Democracy Lab (UDL) at NYU Gallatin
- 2023 Graduate Student Award for Summer Research on Migration, awarded by the NYU Migration Network
PRESENTATIONS
- Assanmal Peláez, L. (2025, August). Accompaniment as a research methodology: Reflections on teaching New York City's "migrant crisis” [Research Symposium]. 2025 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.
- Assanmal Peláez,. (2025, April). Riding on the A train, freedom bound: Venezuelan newcomer youth, placemaking and schooling in New York City [Roundtable session]. 2025 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.
- Assanmal Peláez, L. (2025, February). Accompaniment as a research methodology: Researching immigrant youth & education [Paper presentation]. 2025 Ethnography in Education Research Forum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
- Assanmal Peláez, L. (2024, December). Accompaniment as a research methodology: Researching migration [Lecture]. British Sociological Association Pedagogies of Hope Lecture Series. Virtual.
- Assanmal Peláez, L. (2024, October). Immigrant newcomer youth, placemaking & schooling in New York City [Paper presentation]. CUNY Annual Latinx Symposium Doctoral Student Panel, Brooklyn, NY.