Shirin Vossoughi
Biographic Data
| ID | 3638777 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shirin Vossoughi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shirin |
| FAMILY NAME | Vossoughi |
| SIGNATURE | VOSSOUGHI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4338-7551 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 93 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Learning to Attune and Revise
In this response to Silvis, Clarke‐Midura, Lee and Shumway as part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, I discuss some of the key openings and complexities involved in interpreting the affective, powered, embodied, historical, and cultural layers present within the learning processes of young children in a computer science setting. I consider 1) methodology as a process of learning to …
Epistemological/Ontological Interview
World‐Making Through a Feminist Abolitionist Lens in a STEAM Middle School Program
The maker movement propagated throughout educational spaces alongside promises that technological and design literacies could be harnessed to shape equitable social futures. However, researchers have highlighted the ways makerspaces can reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, and class. This paper builds on research that seeks to support girls' making through broader sociopolitical and ethical commitments. We consider what an everyday pedagogy of …
Toward Just and Sustainable Futures
This chapter explores how learning to be in relation is core to human learning. Reductive views of cultural variation and individualized conceptualizations of thriving overlook the processes through which human beings learn to live relationally in ways that support systems transformation and collective well-being. Synthesizing literature on learning and development, we provide a conceptual model that examines four interrelated dimensions of relat…
Elevating the Objectives of Higher Education to Effectively Serve Students From Diverse Socioeconomic Backgrounds
As colleges and universities expand the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations, many policies and practices require reconceptualization to better serve all students. Recent social psychology and learning sciences research directly informs how to support the achievement and well-being of students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, with attention to intersecting minoritized identities. These approaches challenge assimilation…
Writing as a Social Act
Preview this article: Writing as a Social Act: The Feedback Relation as a Context for Political and Ethical Becoming, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/2/researchintheteachingofenglish31477-1.gif
"Pedagogical "Hands and Eyes
Drawing from a range of ethnographic information gathered within a participatory design project on after-school learning and educational justice, this paper describes the new ways of seeing and relating that emerged when researchers and educators "examined the obvious" (Erickson 1973/84) and closely analyzed the embodied-physical, gestural, artifact-mediated-dimensions of learning interactions. As participants co-analyzed field notes, photographs…
Multiple Ways of Knowing
Multiple Ways of Knowing * - 1 - Re-Imagining Disciplinary Learning
Embodied Pathways and Ethical Trails
Studies of embodied cognition offer powerful accounts of the semiotic resources people use as they think together within different domains. Yet this research does not typically foreground the history of relationships within focal interactions—a history we have found to be consequential to the ways embodied actions unfold. Through ethnographic and interactional analysis of the assistance students received in a tinkering afterschool program and the…
Learning from below
The culture of poverty, again
This introduction to the special issue offers a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific train of thought called the “culture of poverty” from its origin in 1959, through its express track to prominence across the 1960s, to its research-led crash from 1968 to 1980. The reason for documenting this history is the reemergence of culture of po…
From the poverty of culture to the power of politics
The culture of poverty thesis did not emerge from the conservative shadows of American intellectual life, but from its most liberal hopes for the future. Most of its earliest champions were committed to the cause of Black uplift, but never escaped the shame and judgment of the culture of poverty thesis. We look to the life and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois for examples of alternative possibilities. We could see Du Bois as an elitist who subscribed t…
In this issue
Matters of participation
Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activities) and educational dignity (i.e., the multifaceted sense of a person's value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one's mind, humanity, and potential) are vital and interrelated social phenomena. Conceptually, the two are salient for research related to learning and educational rights. Accordant with …
Not in their name
This paper problematizes the enduring conscription of STEM learning in discourses of U.S. global ascendancy, neoliberalism and militarism. Drawing on ethnographic data, we explore how girls of color make meaning of their everyday experiences in two settings: a racially tracked mathematics class in a suburban high school and a STEAM based after-school program in a working class urban community. The stories of these girls – separated by time, place…
Toward What Ends
Rewriting Race, Class, and the “culture of poverty
Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) was a cultural anthropologist and prominent critic of the “culture of poverty” framework. This paper analyzes Leacock’s writings on the culture of poverty with the following questions in mind: How did Leacock’s critique of the culture of poverty framework evolve over time? What was her dissatisfaction with the available conceptual vocabulary and how was she struggling to grow beyond it? We illustrate the shift in Leaco…
On the Lookout
Transcultural Prefigurations
Participatory Design Research and Educational Justice
This special issue brings together a set of articles by scholars working to expand equitable forms of learning and teaching that contribute to a socially just democracy—or what we might call “socia...
Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power
In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker movement will contribute to intellectually generative and liberatory educational experiences for work…
What Does the Camera Communicate? An Inquiry into the Politics and Possibilities of Video Research on Learning
Confronting the Home-Field Disadvantage
This book provides a broad, historically informed, methodologically sophisticated argument for diversity in the conduct of psychological and anthropological research that seeks to understand the re
Social Analytic Artifacts Made Concrete
In an educational setting designed for high-school-aged migrant students, social analytic artifacts—tools that deepen the collective analysis of social problems—were examined in relation to two questions: What kinds of artifacts were developed and emphasized in this setting? How and toward what ends did students use these artifacts? This article describes how students appropriated two artifacts—heteroglossic attunement and semantic sharpening—to …
Lifting Off the Ground to Return Anew
This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments-cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children-are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especia…
Lifting Off the Ground to Return Anew
This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments-cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children-are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especia…
Matters of participation
Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activities) and educational dignity (i.e., the multifaceted sense of a person's value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one's mind, humanity, and potential) are vital and interrelated social phenomena. Conceptually, the two are salient for research related to learning and educational rights. Accordant with …
Not in their name
This paper problematizes the enduring conscription of STEM learning in discourses of U.S. global ascendancy, neoliberalism and militarism. Drawing on ethnographic data, we explore how girls of color make meaning of their everyday experiences in two settings: a racially tracked mathematics class in a suburban high school and a STEAM based after-school program in a working class urban community. The stories of these girls – separated by time, place…
The culture of poverty, again
This introduction to the special issue offers a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific train of thought called the “culture of poverty” from its origin in 1959, through its express track to prominence across the 1960s, to its research-led crash from 1968 to 1980. The reason for documenting this history is the reemergence of culture of po…
What Does the Camera Communicate? An Inquiry into the Politics and Possibilities of Video Research on Learning
"Pedagogical "Hands and Eyes
Drawing from a range of ethnographic information gathered within a participatory design project on after-school learning and educational justice, this paper describes the new ways of seeing and relating that emerged when researchers and educators "examined the obvious" (Erickson 1973/84) and closely analyzed the embodied-physical, gestural, artifact-mediated-dimensions of learning interactions. As participants co-analyzed field notes, photographs…
Transcultural Prefigurations
From the poverty of culture to the power of politics
The culture of poverty thesis did not emerge from the conservative shadows of American intellectual life, but from its most liberal hopes for the future. Most of its earliest champions were committed to the cause of Black uplift, but never escaped the shame and judgment of the culture of poverty thesis. We look to the life and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois for examples of alternative possibilities. We could see Du Bois as an elitist who subscribed t…
Rewriting Race, Class, and the “culture of poverty
Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) was a cultural anthropologist and prominent critic of the “culture of poverty” framework. This paper analyzes Leacock’s writings on the culture of poverty with the following questions in mind: How did Leacock’s critique of the culture of poverty framework evolve over time? What was her dissatisfaction with the available conceptual vocabulary and how was she struggling to grow beyond it? We illustrate the shift in Leaco…
Lifting Off the Ground to Return Anew
This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments-cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children-are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especia…
Social Analytic Artifacts Made Concrete
In an educational setting designed for high-school-aged migrant students, social analytic artifacts—tools that deepen the collective analysis of social problems—were examined in relation to two questions: What kinds of artifacts were developed and emphasized in this setting? How and toward what ends did students use these artifacts? This article describes how students appropriated two artifacts—heteroglossic attunement and semantic sharpening—to …
Confronting the Home-Field Disadvantage
This book provides a broad, historically informed, methodologically sophisticated argument for diversity in the conduct of psychological and anthropological research that seeks to understand the re
Participatory Design Research and Educational Justice
This special issue brings together a set of articles by scholars working to expand equitable forms of learning and teaching that contribute to a socially just democracy—or what we might call “socia...
Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power
In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker movement will contribute to intellectually generative and liberatory educational experiences for work…
What Does the Camera Communicate? An Inquiry into the Politics and Possibilities of Video Research on Learning
On the Lookout
Transcultural Prefigurations
Toward What Ends
Rewriting Race, Class, and the “culture of poverty
Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) was a cultural anthropologist and prominent critic of the “culture of poverty” framework. This paper analyzes Leacock’s writings on the culture of poverty with the following questions in mind: How did Leacock’s critique of the culture of poverty framework evolve over time? What was her dissatisfaction with the available conceptual vocabulary and how was she struggling to grow beyond it? We illustrate the shift in Leaco…
Not in their name
This paper problematizes the enduring conscription of STEM learning in discourses of U.S. global ascendancy, neoliberalism and militarism. Drawing on ethnographic data, we explore how girls of color make meaning of their everyday experiences in two settings: a racially tracked mathematics class in a suburban high school and a STEAM based after-school program in a working class urban community. The stories of these girls – separated by time, place…
Multiple Ways of Knowing
Multiple Ways of Knowing * - 1 - Re-Imagining Disciplinary Learning
Embodied Pathways and Ethical Trails
Studies of embodied cognition offer powerful accounts of the semiotic resources people use as they think together within different domains. Yet this research does not typically foreground the history of relationships within focal interactions—a history we have found to be consequential to the ways embodied actions unfold. Through ethnographic and interactional analysis of the assistance students received in a tinkering afterschool program and the…
Learning from below
The culture of poverty, again
This introduction to the special issue offers a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific train of thought called the “culture of poverty” from its origin in 1959, through its express track to prominence across the 1960s, to its research-led crash from 1968 to 1980. The reason for documenting this history is the reemergence of culture of po…
From the poverty of culture to the power of politics
The culture of poverty thesis did not emerge from the conservative shadows of American intellectual life, but from its most liberal hopes for the future. Most of its earliest champions were committed to the cause of Black uplift, but never escaped the shame and judgment of the culture of poverty thesis. We look to the life and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois for examples of alternative possibilities. We could see Du Bois as an elitist who subscribed t…
In this issue
Matters of participation
Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activities) and educational dignity (i.e., the multifaceted sense of a person's value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one's mind, humanity, and potential) are vital and interrelated social phenomena. Conceptually, the two are salient for research related to learning and educational rights. Accordant with …
Elevating the Objectives of Higher Education to Effectively Serve Students From Diverse Socioeconomic Backgrounds
As colleges and universities expand the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations, many policies and practices require reconceptualization to better serve all students. Recent social psychology and learning sciences research directly informs how to support the achievement and well-being of students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, with attention to intersecting minoritized identities. These approaches challenge assimilation…
Writing as a Social Act
Preview this article: Writing as a Social Act: The Feedback Relation as a Context for Political and Ethical Becoming, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/2/researchintheteachingofenglish31477-1.gif
"Pedagogical "Hands and Eyes
Drawing from a range of ethnographic information gathered within a participatory design project on after-school learning and educational justice, this paper describes the new ways of seeing and relating that emerged when researchers and educators "examined the obvious" (Erickson 1973/84) and closely analyzed the embodied-physical, gestural, artifact-mediated-dimensions of learning interactions. As participants co-analyzed field notes, photographs…
Toward Just and Sustainable Futures
This chapter explores how learning to be in relation is core to human learning. Reductive views of cultural variation and individualized conceptualizations of thriving overlook the processes through which human beings learn to live relationally in ways that support systems transformation and collective well-being. Synthesizing literature on learning and development, we provide a conceptual model that examines four interrelated dimensions of relat…
World‐Making Through a Feminist Abolitionist Lens in a STEAM Middle School Program
The maker movement propagated throughout educational spaces alongside promises that technological and design literacies could be harnessed to shape equitable social futures. However, researchers have highlighted the ways makerspaces can reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, and class. This paper builds on research that seeks to support girls' making through broader sociopolitical and ethical commitments. We consider what an everyday pedagogy of …
Epistemological/Ontological Interview
Learning to Attune and Revise
In this response to Silvis, Clarke‐Midura, Lee and Shumway as part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, I discuss some of the key openings and complexities involved in interpreting the affective, powered, embodied, historical, and cultural layers present within the learning processes of young children in a computer science setting. I consider 1) methodology as a process of learning to …
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Pedagogy (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Innovative Education and Learning Practices (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Ethnography (6 works) · Law (6 works)