Cris Mayo

Cris Mayo, associate professor in the departments of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership and Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a longtime fan of AESA, first presenting in 1999. Her research interests include queer youth, gender and sexuality studies, and antiracist pedagogy. Her service to the association has included non-onerous work on the Kneller Committee as member and later chair (tasked with bringing great speakers) and the program committee (tasked with finding out how much superb work is being done in social foundations of education). She has organized more than a dozen panels, often, in good AESA tradition, combining graduate student and faculty. In addition, like most people, she has chaired many panels. She has been known to heckle the leadership so this nomination may be a mistake. But if elected to serve the association, she will continue to support programming that continues the fine work AESA does to help graduate students continue to craft their projects and understand the process of entering the job market, as well as advocate for intersectional analyses of educational injustices that see the connections among race, class, gender, sexuality, and gender identity, among others.