Name: Faith Northern
Email: fdn2009@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
Research description/bio: Faith (she/her) is a first-generation, low-income (FGLI) doctoral student in the Sociology of Education program at NYU Steinhardt. Faith is a proud alumna of Vassar College, where she graduated with her B.A. in Biochemistry, Educational Studies, and History. There, she began to foster her interest in education research while working with nonprofit organizations in Greece and Poughkeepsie, NY, teaching race education to elementary-aged students, student teaching in K-12 and higher education classrooms, and as a research assistant, which ultimately brought her to the AERA (in 2022) and solidified her stay in academia.
Her central line of research concentrates on her own struggles with identity as an Afro-Caribbean and the work completed in her joint undergraduate thesis in Educational Studies and History. Through experiencing her and her community’s struggles with educational inequity, she noticed a distinct dissonance between the experiences and overall perception of her African-American peers against those of immigrant, African/Afro-Caribbean heritage. Her curiosities led to her interest in evaluating and updating the social, political, and educational realities of the K-12 experiences of Afro-Jamaican immigrant students (AJIS) to contribute to a more contemporary understanding of their experiences with schooling in the US context.
Originally from Glenridge, New Jersey, Faith enjoys a mix of physical and creative hobbies such as playing basketball, painting, and creating.
Selected Awards, Publications, and Presentations:
Publications:
Williams Brown, K., Northern, F., Kallman, C. (2024). Fugitive Care: The Politics of Care Enacted by Afro-Caribbean Women Teachers. Journal of Teacher Education.
Khan, A., Northern, F., 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.
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.
Presentations:
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.