About

Professor Dana Nickson is affiliated with the Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington. The Center is a central location for partnerships, program development, and collaborative research with educational settings that seek to center and sustain Native, Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and all Global Majority young people and communities across multiple intersections with gender, disability, language, land, migration, and class. The Center's work includes projects such as the Tulalip Culturally Sustaining Education Project and the Future Teachers of Color Seattle Children’s Culturally Sustaining Education Learning Collaborative, which aim to promote justice-centered teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Dana Nickson's role involves engaging in research and partnerships that focus on educational justice, supporting initiatives that foster inclusive and culturally sustaining educational practices.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Pedagogy
• Public relations
• Public administration
• Social Science
• Economic growth
• Gender studies
• Socioeconomics

Selected publications

• Storying Black and Indigenous Communities’ Place/Land Relations in Educational Engagement and Advocacy

  Inclusive learning and educational equity · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Partnering to make a homeplace for Black families: Black women's systemic leadership in an era of retrenchment

  Education Policy Analysis Archives · 2025-08-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines how a research-community-practice partnership (RCPP) led primarily by Black women district and community leaders navigated systemic challenges to racial equity work and created conditions for co-designing with Black families and communities. Drawing on data analyses from planning meetings with district leaders, families, community partners, and university researchers, we discuss three findings pertaining to our RCPP’s efforts to foster conditions for co-designing justice-centered, pro-Black early literacy learning with Black families and educators: 1) Black women leaders’ ability to “read” the historically-rooted dynamic inequities of the system; 2) Black women’s leadership and placemaking in the RCPP to co-create homeplace; and 3) community partners’ leadership in evolving our partnership practices to better honor family and community leadership. Implications illuminate the importance of supporting and honoring Black feminist leadership approaches to sustain racial equity work as well as insights about designing for systemic sustainability amidst the constant shifts of leadership, resources, and organizational structures in an urban school district in the U.S. West. Efforts to evolve the RCPP’s practices resulted in a set of design principles that represent an emergent, collective strategy to create conditions for solidarity-driven co-design amidst retrenchment from equity work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Placemaking and Contesting the Spatial Politics of Suburbia: A Black and Latinx Geographies Perspective

  Educational Studies · 2025-11-02

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Black Spatial Storylines: Connections of Black Space, Sound and Story as Pedagogy

  International Journal of Qualitative Methods · 2024-01-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Black education has interrogated race, context, and power questions, yet these practices spanning geographies and learning contexts have not always been valued as spatial knowledge. Further, Black scholars have carved out spaces that honor the communal and spatial sensibilities of Black students, educators, and communities. Black geographies thought can help us reshape how we understand and interrogate issues within education and learning with attention to anti-blackness, futurities, imagining, placemaking, and efforts to create a sense of belonging despite perpetual unbelongingness in dominant educational and learning spaces. Thus, our piece engages with Black Geographies to emphasize the Black radical traditions of space and freedom-making to reorganize our approaches to pedagogy and storytelling. We engage what we call Black Spatial Storylines through our shared and individual stories. We present multiple vignettes and examples to model the ways Black Sound, particularly hip-hop, invites us to engage Black Spatial Storylines as both methodological and pedagogical techniques that start at Blackness. Not only do we highlight and use our own stories as examples, we detail how this process shifts our understanding of Black urban life, and allows us to reorient our educational praxis through Blackness. We conclude with suggested pathways for future applications of a Black geographies framework to education and learning, including the abundance that is the interweaving of Blackness. Thus, we hope to honor and uplift Black communities’ spatial knowledge by formulating our foundational understandings of Black spatial knowledge and the role it plays in education and learning studies.

  PublisherDOI

• “Livonia is just all racism”: locating black families’ racial and spatial experiences, school choices, and educational agency in metropolitan Detroit

  Race Ethnicity and Education · 2024-10-22 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Black Movement, Black Striving: Perceptions of Place and School Choice Decision-Making in Metropolitan Detroit

  Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 2022-06-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Using a critical phenomenological methodology, this study aims to better understand how seven Black families’ perceptions of place shaped their physical movement in pursuit of quality schools and educational opportunity in the metropolitan Detroit region. Detailed information about research methods and key findings from this study can be found in Dana Nickson’s (2020) dissertation study, Black Movement, Black Striving: Perceptions of Place and School Choice Decision-Making in Metropolitan Detroit. A subset of findings will also be published in the Nickson (forthcoming) AERA Open paper: Embracing the City: Place Attachments and (Re)imaginings of The City and Suburb in Black Families’ Search for Educational Opportunity.

  PublisherDOI

• “Nothing about us without us”: Tending to emancipatory ideologies and transformative goals in participatory action research partnerships

  Qualitative Research · 2022 · 13 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  In this paper, a collaborative group of university researchers and a community organizer who participated in a 2-year participatory action research (PAR) partnership reflect upon their inquiry process and analyze its effects. Authors examine the benefits, challenges, and potential of using PAR to advance educational justice and transformative goals amidst austere neoliberal education reforms, such as public school closure and state sanctioned privatization. Authors consider ways PAR can reflect emancipatory ideologies, enable social and political change, and disrupt oppressive dynamics that many urban education organizers and activists oppose. Insights pertain to cultivating community-based norms that foster collective learning, agency, and social action, while also confronting methodological tensions in the work. Such tensions pertained to varied ideas about emotionality in research, research design, and the layered power dynamics of university-community relations. Authors highlight implications for implementing justice-oriented PAR in urban education arenas affected by intensifying neoliberal political contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Embracing the City: Black Families’ Place Attachments and (Re)imaginings of the City and Suburb in Search of Educational Opportunity

  AERA Open · 2022-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Like many predominantly Black urban cities, Detroit, Michigan, has experienced significant out-migration among Black residents over the past 30 years. This situation has altered families’ relationships to the communities and schools where they have been nurtured or call home. Therefore, this paper examines how seven Black families’ place attachments influenced their geographic movement and school choices in the Detroit metropolitan region. Findings show that despite families’ movement to surrounding suburbs, varied experiences in Detroit influenced families’ decision-making regarding where to live, their search for sociocultural experiences that supported their families holistically, and their perceptions and navigation of municipal boundaries and borders. Families’ intention toward maintaining connections with Detroit enact what I term embracing the city. Embracing the city helps consider the importance of socio-spatial ties that persist and orient Black families’ community perceptions and school choices in suburban contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• The Democratization of Educational Care: Spatial Imaginaries, Demographic Change, and Black Families Continued Educational Advocacy

  Equity & Excellence in Education · 2021 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Economic growth

  Too often, Black families’ educational agency has been marginalized in discourse on racial and spatial divides in US education. Indeed, Black families have persistently employed a range of tactics to access and create the educational resources their children deserve. Drawing from scholarship on spatial imaginaries, in this article, I track how Black families have developed democratic and communal outlooks on place-based resources such as public schools. I identify what I term democratization of educational care, or how some Black families’ educational advocacy for their own children broadly benefit all students. To demonstrate these dynamics, I share how Black families’ educational advocacy in a demographically changing suburb of Detroit, Michigan, uplifted the needs of their children, while also seeking to address larger systemic inequities. Implications suggest how school leaders can learn from the positioned knowledge and advocacy of Black families to foster educational equity and care in demographically changing school systems.

  PublisherDOI

• Spiriting urban educational justice: The leadership of African American mothers organizing for school equity and local control

  Journal of Educational Change · 2021 · 13 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Camille M. Wilson

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  3 shared

• Kimberly C. Ransom

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2 shared

• Dawn Wilson-Clark

  1 shared

• Kaleb Germinaro

  University of Illinois Chicago

  1 shared

• Carolyn Hetrick

  1 shared

Labs

• Center for Educational JusticePI

Education

• Bachelor of Arts, African American Studies

  Northwestern University

  2011

Awards & honors

• Art of Leadership Teaching Award, Danforth Educational Leade…
• AERA Division L Education Policy & Politics Outstanding Diss…
• Stanley E. & Ruth B. Dimond Best Dissertation Award, Univers…
• Barbara Jackson Scholar, University Council for Educational…
• Rackham Merit Fellow, University of Michigan, 2015-2020