Ayana Allen-Handy

Ayana Allen-Handy, PhD is an Associate Professor of Urban Education and Chair of the Policy, Organization, and Leadership Department at Drexel University's School of Education. She is also the Founder/Director of the Justice-Oriented Youth Education Lab (The JOY Lab). Grounded in critical race and intersectional theoretical framings, her work is dedicated to justice-oriented urban education and is built upon debunking and (re)framing pejorative narratives of urban students, schools, and communities. Her work strives to (re)imagine urban from a place of decline to a place of possibilities. Therefore, her research employs asset-based critical perspectives which recognize the resources and assets that individuals and communities possess that derive from their lived experiences, and the role that power and privilege have played in maintaining inequitable educational opportunities. Particularly, her work centers the strengths that illuminate the community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge that are embedded in historically marginalized places and spaces and amongst the mosaic of diverse people groups therein. She seeks to highlight the human, cultural, and social capital that are often unrecognized and unacknowledged by the status quo. Her work does not focus on problems and issues in urban education alone, but critical solutions and participatory approaches in an effort to espouse equity, agency, and critical capacity building. For example, her work strives to support the capacity of students, teachers, schools, and communities to create, implement, and sustain their own solutions to issues that directly impact them through critical Youth and Community-led Participatory Action Research.