About

Michael V. Singh is an educator, qualitative social scientist, and associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. from the Berkeley School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarship is guided by questions of racial and gender justice in schools, with a focus on Latino men and boys. Singh’s research has been published in prominent journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Educational Research Journal, Race Ethnicity and Education, Urban Education, and Review of Educational Research. He authored the book 'Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools,' which is based on ethnographic research with a school-based mentorship program for Latino boys and explores educational empowerment amidst neoliberal multiculturalism. Singh’s work critically examines male empowerment narratives and advocates for reimagining Latino manhood beyond racial respectability and patriarchal redemption. His ongoing projects include a second book titled 'Deconstructing Mr. Macho,' which investigates how Latino male teachers challenge patriarchy and racism in schools. Additionally, he is a co-editor of a special issue of Race Ethnicity and Education that highlights critical dialogues in Latinx education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Law
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Political economy
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• A broad politics of justice: a practitioner inquiry study into Latinidad & Latine/x education at a college education symposium

  Race Ethnicity and Education · 2026-01-31

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• Who Are Chicanas/os/x, and Why Does the Field of Education Study Them? A Critical Scoping Review of the Literature, 2008–2023

  Review of Educational Research · 2026-03-17

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  In the 1960s, the term Chicano emerged as an identity of empowerment for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and others in the United States. While initially widely used, terms like Latinx and Hispanic have become the primary categories in educational research. To better understand who Chicanas/os/x are and why educational researchers continue to study them, this article reviews contemporary, empirical education literature (2008–2023) that explicitly identifies its research participants as Chicanx. Findings reveal a range of variations. Many studies rigidly tie the term to Mexican heritage, while others present it as a political identity that transcends ethnicity. We also found feminist researchers employing the term as a methodological strategy. Here, Chicanx was used as a fragmented and fluid demographic to disrupt Western ontologies and highlight intersectionality. Overall, our review clarifies the contradictory uses of Chicanx, the varied rationales for studying this population, and the enduring woman-of-color feminist politics that keep Chicanx relevant today.

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• Toward (more critical, more unruly) Diálogos

  Race Ethnicity and Education · 2026-02-04 · 1 citations

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• What is this ‘Latinx’ in Latinx education? (Re)articulating Latinx education against hegemony and towards a politics of antiracism and justice

  Equity & Excellence in Education · 2025-06-03 · 6 citations

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• Teacher Recruitment and Retention, Men of Color

  2025-01-01

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• Toxic Masculinity Masking as Cultural Relevancy: Latino Men Navigating Heteropatriarchal Expectations of Manhood in the Teaching Profession

  Harvard Educational Review · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

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  In this qualitative study, Michael V. Singh deconstructs how and why Latino men teachers are asked to perform a culturally relevant manhood in the classroom. He looks at the ways these teachers experience and navigate the heteropatriarchal expectations associated with their teaching and gender performance, which are often (mis) framed as “cultural relevancy” and reproduce hegemonic and toxic masculinity. The eleven Latino men in this study described such expectations as coming from teachers and administrators, who positioned them to embody tropes of the macho Mexican patriarch who disciplines unruly boys, and also from students, who sometimes wanted their teachers to perform a Latino manhood admired for its physical and sexual power. The participants also recounted how they navigated these expectations in ways that disrupted and queered the figure of the culturally relevant Latino man teacher. This study deconstructs how and why Latino men teachers are asked to perform a culturally relevant manhood in the classroom.

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• Education and Colonialism

  2023-06-01 · 4 citations

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  In education, knowledge is most often regarded as a cognitive process. This chapter extends the cognitive into a more complete uptake of politics and history by presenting three main frameworks and methodologies for understanding education as part of the colonial project. One, the chapter presents the insights of Frantz Fanon and Linda Tuhiwai Smith as they relate to the decolonization of schools, which includes interrogating the knowledge generated by social research. Examples include the challenge to mainstream education posed by ethnic studies and historical events like the creation of the Third World Liberation Front. Two, the authors explicate the innovations of decolonial thought, which scrutinize the Eurocentric functions and foundations of knowledge. As a form of epistemic resistance or disobedience, interrogating the coloniality of power in education and other social institutions locates the real effects and continuation of colonialism, even after the fall of its official, administrative form. Last, following Edward Said’s postcolonial analysis, the chapter ends by describing the ways that colonial-imperial knowledge reduces, distorts, and simplifies the Other through a politics of representation. The imperial function of representation includes epistemologies that infantilize, objectify, and pathologize the educational margins in the form of urban Orientalism.

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• Negotiating Antiblackness as Nonblack Latino Men Teachers: Relational Race Politics in the Discourse on Men of Color Teachers

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

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• Educators as decolonial intellectuals: revolutionary thought from Gramsci to Fanon

  Critical Studies in Education · 2023 · 8 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  For several decades, the Gramscian notion of the intellectual has been a popular framework to view the potentiality of educators as counter-hegemonic cultural workers. While this was an invaluable contribution to the field of critical education, notions of the intellectual have largely focused on class conflict. For a deeper theorization of the intellectual and race, we turn to the work of decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon. In his work, Fanon theorizes the role of the intellectual amid the struggle against colonialism. In this article, we examine Fanon’s intellectual work as well as his writing on the ‘colonized intellectual’ to articulate what we describe as a Fanonian decolonial intellectual. We conclude by highlighting the importance of Fanon’s contributions on the intellectual for educators of color, who presently find themselves compromised by a hegemony characterized by neoliberal multiculturalism in education.

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• Negotiating Antiblackness as Non-Black Latino Men Teachers: Relational Race Politics in the Discourse on Men of Color Teachers

  Urban Education · 2023-03-14 · 7 citations

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  This article examines the ways non-Black Latino men teachers understand their relationality to (anti)blackness in urban education. While the dominant discourse surrounding men of color teachers presumes an innate allyship among all men and boys of color, the Latino men in this study describe being positioned as multicultural punishers for Black boys and needing to confront their own internalized antiblackness. This led them to challenge liberal multiculturalist beliefs in their schools, which upheld anti-Black racism. Overall, this study brings a relational-race approach to the topic of men of color teachers to help honor difference and deepen visions of racial justice.

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Frequent coauthors

• Zeus Leonardo

  University of California, Berkeley

  3 shared

• Ziza Delgado Noguera

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Graduate School of Education

  University of California Berkeley

  2019

Awards & honors

• Critics’ Choice Book Award (Good Boys, Bad Hombres), AESA, 2…
• Faculty Advocate for Community Retention Award. El Centro, U…
• Faculty Award for Mentoring Students, College of Letters & S…
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Academy of Education/Spenc…
• Hellman Fellowship, UC Davis, 2022