About

Zeus Leonardo is a Professor of Education at the UC Berkeley School of Education, where he is also affiliated with the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis. His research focuses on the study of ideologies and discourses in education with respect to structural relations of power. His work is interdisciplinary, drawing insights from sociology, contemporary philosophy, and cultural studies, and employs critical theories to analyze the relationship between schooling and social relations such as race, class, culture, and gender. Leonardo's scholarship emphasizes that educational knowledge should promote the democratization of schools and society. He has published extensively on critical social thought in education, including numerous articles and books. His recent publications include 'Edward Said and Education,' 'Education and Racism,' and 'Race Frameworks: A Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education.' Leonardo is recognized as an AERA Fellow, a Derrick Bell Legacy Awardee, and a member of the National Academy of Education. His professional interests encompass cultural studies, democratic education, diversity, ethnic issues, minorities, and multicultural education.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy
• Mathematics education
• Law

Selected publications

• The Proliferation of Crits and Critical Studies: What It Means to Take a Critical Perspective in Education

  Springer international handbooks of education · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Teachers as critical anti-intellectuals: Edward Said and educational criticism

  Globalisation Societies and Education · 2025-01-13 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Education and Colonialism

  2023-06-01 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  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.

  PublisherDOI

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

  Critical Studies in Education · 2023 · 8 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • 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.

  PublisherDOI

• After the Glow

  2022-10-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This 2011 essay by Zeus Leonardo explores the myriad meanings of race and ambivalence surrounding race in what has been called the ‘post-race’ era. As Leonardo notes, after the United States presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008, many questioned the concept of race and the continued value of race-based discourse. Those on the right criticized the usefulness of race as a social category in relation to the possible merits of color-blind, non-racialized discourse. Those on the left also conceded the limitations and incoherence of race as a concept, but continued to witness and emphasize the pernicious impact of racialization on racialized people’s lives. One key issue here, Leonardo observes, is that racism has never been only about skin color, and it has not been conceptualized in a universal way across countries or over time. Furthermore, race as an essentialist notion is different from, and less useful than, other key social categories like culture and ethnicity, which (also) continue to have significance in education and social life. Thus, ambivalence about race marks the ‘post-race’ era, where race cannot be ignored, but any account of it must confront its inadequacy. What racism means to diverse racialized groups and white groups is also discussed in this essay, which concludes that racialized groups must remain hopeful about the possibility of a post-racial time, while white people seem ‘optimistic’ but less ‘hopeful’, regarding the history and ongoing saliency of race. This is a powerful essay that engages various debates about what race and racism have been, are, and may look like in the future.

  PublisherDOI

• White woman: or, the abused abuser's role in U.S. educational stratification

  Elsevier eBooks · 2022-11-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• She Blinded Me with Science

  Journal of Curriculum Theorizing · 2022-09-08 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Curriculum scholarship provides the engagement with curriculum differentiation that has defined the field since its inception. Mainly, curriculum scholars shift from the role of science as arbiter of truth to the politics of truth, as science becomes a target of ideology critique. “Post-curriculum” is a place of radical questioning about the guarantees of a traditional science of curriculum. We explore a “new scientific education” not as a rejection of scientific thought and method as much as an assertion of the centrality of skepticism to the scientific endeavor itself. New science recalls the anti-traditionalism of science in the Enlightenment, and post-curriculum is a place of ambivalence that marks a new intellectual place from which to theorize curriculum scholarship’s relationship with science.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racialization, Whiteness, and Education

  2022-09-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses whiteness as a global ideology that determines elite status, access to symbolic and material resources, and ultimately shapes the structure and dynamics of schooling, including curriculum policies. Despite the global reach of whiteness, the history and role of racism in its dominance can often be under-theorized. Revisiting his 2002 article, “The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse” that argued that “critical pedagogy benefits from an intersectional understanding of whiteness studies and globalization discourse” (p. 29), through this conversation between Zeus Leonardo, Monisha Bajaj, and Janelle Scott, the chapter offers analyses about the shifting terrain of white supremacy as it manifests and circulates globally. Leonardo calls for both global studies of whiteness as well as comparative whiteness studies across contexts that attend to history, geography, power asymmetries, and ideology.

  PublisherDOI

• The Color of Supremacy

  2022-11-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter takes a different approach toward the study of whiteness. It argues that a critical look at white privilege, or the analysis of white racial hegemony, must be complemented by an equally rigorous examination of white supremacy, or the analysis of white racial domination. As such, a critical pedagogy of white racial supremacy revolves less around the issue of unearned advantages, or the state of being dominant, and more around direct processes that secure domination and the privileges associated with it. To the extent that domination represents a process that establishes the supremacy of a racial group, its resulting everyday politics is understood as “dominance.” Articulating the possibility of “universal” white supremacy necessitates strategies that unpack discourses in particular school places. One of its features that critical educators confront is the notion of investment. Discourses of supremacy acknowledge white privileges, but only as a function of whites’ actions toward minority subjects.

  PublisherDOI

• Schooling in Racist America

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education · 2022-03-22 · 1 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Education is both a racial and class project. This means that a multidimensional theory of educational stratification is necessary if an accurate appraisal of schooling’s modern appearance in capitalist, racialized states is central to the research endeavor. Critiques of capitalism are found in critical pedagogy and Marxist studies of education since the 1970s, which argue that schooling’s intellectual division of labor mirrors the material structures of a capitalist division of labor. In addition, the advent of critical race theory in education since 1995 provides compelling evidence that schooling is not only an ideological apparatus of the capitalist state but also equally of the racist state. Together, developing a critical class theory and critical race theory of education offers a more complete explanation of educational stratification in order to understand its processes and perhaps ways to intervene in them.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• W. Norton Grubb

  11 shared

• Erica Boas

  3 shared

• Peter McLaren

  3 shared

• Michael V. Singh

  University of California, Davis

  3 shared

• Ezekiel Dixon‐Román

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Alicia A. Broderick

  Montclair State University

  2 shared

• Angela P. Harris

  2 shared

• Ronald K. Porter

  2 shared

Labs

• Critical Theory Designated EmphasisPI

Awards & honors

• AERA Fellow
• Derrick Bell Legacy Awardee
• Member of the National Academy of Education
• Lifetime Member, Critical Studies of Race in Education Assoc…