Subini Annamma

Subini Annamma
Occupations	Associate Professor, Special Education Teacher
Board member of	Critical Educators for Social Justice SIG Race Ethnicity and Education
Academic background
Education	University of Colorado Boulder (MA, PhD) University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh (BS)
Thesis	Resistance and Resilience: The Education Trajectories of Young Women of Color with Disabilities through the School to Prison Pipeline (2013)
Doctoral advisor	Janette K. Klingner
Academic work
Discipline	Sociologist
Sub-discipline	Restorative Justice Educational Inequality Intersectionality Sociology of Education Disability studies Black Feminist Sociology Urban Education Critical Race Theory Ethnic studies
Institutions	Stanford University University of Kansas Indiana University
Notable works	The Pedagogy of Pathologization (2017)
Notable ideas	Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit)
Website	Dr. Subini Ancy Annamma's Official Website ORCID Webpage

Subini Annamma is an American academic, professor of education, and sociologist. She is currently an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University Graduate School of Education.

She is a pioneering researcher in Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit).

Her areas of research include sociology of education, critical race theory, disability studies, intersectional justice in education, ethnic studies, carceral logics, school-to-prison pipeline, restorative justice, Black feminist sociology, educational inequality, and special education in the United States.

Annamma identifies as a "multi-racial Black and Asian woman of color" and as "disabled [and] chronically ill."

Education

Annamma completed her BS in Special education in 2002 at University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. She has a MA in special education and English as a second language (2008) and a PhD in educational equity, cultural diversity, and "social, multicultural, and bilingual foundations."

Academia

Annamma began her career as a special education teacher in California, Oregon, and Colorado, working both in public schools and youth detention centers.

Annamma worked as an assistant professor from 2013-2014 at Indiana University-Indianapolis. Also in 2014, she began working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Denver. After leaving the University of Denver in 2015, Annamma became an assistant professor at the University of Kansas where she worked until 2019.

In 2019, Annamma began working as an associate professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Education. She was awarded the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship the same year. The dean of the School of Education said "The Ford Foundation Fellowship is wonderful recognition of the important work Dr. Annamma is doing on incarceration issues for students of color with disabilities... This fellowship will give her a full year to continue her research in this area of growing significance.”

In 2024, she was a Scholar in Service for the Stanford Impact Labs and was awarded a Research and Innovation Grant from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning for her project "Whose expertise matters? Centering Youth Voice to (Re)Conceptualize and Expand Accessibility in Ethnic Studies." Annamma designed an accessible ethnic studies curriculum for the San Francisco Unified School District.

Annamma is the Senior Fellow and Faculty Lead in Education at the Stanford Center for Racial Justice. She co-leads the Roses Talk Project – a project designed to include student voices in equitable education policy – with the Center.

Annamma is a co-director of the Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Walk Out! Lab For Youth Justice with Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks. According to the lab's website, the intersectional project "targets the most entrenched inequities in education by centering those most impacted, multiply-marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color, through innovative thinking and creative partnerships" and "seeks to dismantle the criminalization of youth across education geographies and reimagine p-20 liberatory education."

In 2024, Annamma developed the Formerly Incarcerated Research Experts (FIRE) Fellowship. The six-month fellowship allows formerly incarcerated researchers to work with Annamma in researching the races and disabilities of incarcerated youth or developing their own research project.

I can simply say that for me, Disability Studies, as it grows, I just wanna see it continue to commit to an intersectional perspective, you know. I mean it was not that long ago that Disabled Lives Matter editorial got written in a academic journal, not only coopting the Black Lives Matter language but pitting disabled people and trans folks against each other and arguing that we need to focus on disabled people’s access to bathrooms and not trans access to bathrooms. Just this very unidimensional lens of disability that was disability is…. I think so often, when we’re trying to argue for disability as an important vantage point and as a really essential oppression, there’s a lot of like, “Well, it’s parallel to blackness, and it’s this and it’s that.” And we need to be very careful about being reductive. And I think that’s the danger that Disability Studies will always have to run into and have to really confront. And that’s true of Black Studies, of Ethnic Studies, about Women’s Studies, right? It’s this idea that we can boil ourselves down to a particular perspective or a paradigm, a unidimensional paradigm. So, what I would love to see Disability Studies do is make those connections more clearly across as a field and get at those intersections more clearly without sacrificing disability as a really important identity and ableism as a really important marginalization that we need to understand.

— Dr. Subini Ancy Annamma, Disability Visibility Podcast, Episode 46: Disability Studies

Writing

Annamma has edited and written five books. Her book The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Dis/abled Girls of Color in the School-prison Nexus was awarded the American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Book Award and the National Women's Studies Association Alison Piepmeier Book Prize.

Annamma has served on the editorial board of Race Ethnicity and Education and Focus on Exceptional Children. She has also worked as an editor for Multiple Voices for Ethnically Diverse Exceptional Learners.

Annamma has had journal articles published in the Educational Researcher, Race Ethnicity and Education, NYU Review of Law & Social Change's The Harbinger, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Teachers College Record, and more. Annamma has also been featured on Disability Visibility Project.

She wrote an article for Teen Vogue on the intersectional criminalization of disabled Black girls with Rep. Ayanna Pressley and advocate Vilissa Thompson. The article tied into Rep. Pressley's Ending PUSHOUT Act. She has also written articles for Insider Higher Ed, Los Angeles Times, and The Imprint.

Annamma's book DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education was included in Thompson's "Black Disabled Woman Syllabus."

Publications

Books

• Connor, David J.; Ferri, Beth A.; Annamma, Subini Ancy, eds. (December 30, 2015). DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education. Teachers College Press. ISBN 978-0807756676.
• Morrison, Deb; Annamma, Subini Ancy; Jackson, Darrell D., eds. (April 11, 2017). Critical Race Spatial Analysis: Mapping to Understand and Address Educational Inequity. Stylus. ISBN 978-1620364246.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy (November 14, 2017). The Pedagogy of Pathologization. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138696907.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Ferri, Beth A.; Connor, David J., eds. (February 25, 2022). DisCrit Expanded: Inquiries, Reverberations & Ruptures. Teachers College Press. ISBN 978-0807766347.
• Ferri, Beth A.; Connor, David J.; Annamma, Subini Ancy, eds. (October 9, 2024). Enacting Disability Critical Race Theory. Routledge. ISBN 978-1032461601.

Selected Chapters

• Annamma, Subini Ancy (2021). "Too Intersectional: What Black Feminism and Disability Studies Can Build Together". In Luna, Zakiya; Pirtle, Whitney (eds.). Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis. ISBN 9781041016120.
• Migliarini, V; Annamma, Subini Ancy (2019). "Applying Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) in the Practice of Teacher Education in the United States". In Lampert, J (ed.). Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Ferri, B; Connor, D (2018). "Cultivating and expanding DisCrit (Disability Critical Race Theory)". Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies. Vol. 1. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 230–238.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy (2017). "Cartographies of Inequity". In Morrison, D; Annamma, Subini Ancy; Jackson, D (eds.). Critical Race Spatial Analysis: Mapping to Understand and Address Educational Inequity. Virginia: Stylus. pp. 32–50.
• Waitoller, F; Annamma, Subini Ancy (2017). "Taking a spatial turn in inclusive education: Understanding complex forms of exclusion at the intersections of multiple markers of difference". In Tejero-Hughes, M; Talbott, E (eds.). The Handbook of Research on Diversity in Special Education. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 23–44.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy (2015). "Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline through Disability Critical Race Theory". In Drakeford, L (ed.). The Race Controversy in American Education. Praeger Publishing.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy (2015). "We can't breathe: The impacts of police brutality on women of color". In Fasching-Varner, K.; Hartlep, N. (eds.). The Assault on Communities of Color: Exploring the Realities of Race-Based Violence. Roman & Littlefield.
• Klingner, JK; Boardman, AG; Annamma, Subini Ancy (2013). "Promoting high expectations with collaborative strategic reading". In Dudley-Marling, C; Michaels, S (eds.). Places where ALL children learn: The power of high expectation curricula.

Selected Articles

• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Boveda, M (2023). "Beyond Making a Statement: An Intersectional Framing of the Power and Possibilities of Positioning". Educational Researcher. doi:10.3102/0013189X231167149.

• Wilt, Courtney L.; Annamma, Subini Ancy; Wilmot, Jennifer M.; Nyegenye, Sylvia N.; Miller, Amanda L.; Jackson, Elizabeth E. (2022). "Performing color-evasiveness: A DisCrit analysis of educators? discourse in the U.S". Teaching and Teacher Education: 117. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2022.103761.
• Cabral, B; Annamma, Subini Ancy; Morgan, J (2023). ""When You Carry a Lot": The Forgotten Spaces of Youth Prison Schooling for Incarcerated Disabled Girls of Color". Teachers College Record. 125 (5): 95–113. doi:10.1177/01614681231181816.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Cabral, Brian; Harvey, Brianna; Wilmot, Jennifer M.; Le, Annie; Morgan, Jamelia (September 12, 2023). ""When We Come to Your Class … We Feel Not Like We're in Prison": Resisting Prison-School's Dehumanizing and (De)Socializing Mechanisms Through Abolitionist Praxis". American Educational Research Journal. 61 (1): 3–47. doi:10.3102/00028312231198236 – via Sage Journals.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Handy, Tamara (2020). "Sharpening Justice Through DisCrit: A Contrapuntal Analysis of Education". Educational Researcher. doi:10.3102/0013189X20953838.
• Connor, David J.; Ferri, Beth A.; Annamma, Subini Ancy (2021). "From the Personal to the Global: Engaging with and Enacting DisCrit Theory Across Multiple Spaces". Race Ethnicity and Education. 24 (5): 597–606. doi:10.1080/13613324.2021.1918400.
• Love, Hailey R.; Nyegenye, Sylvia N.; Wilt, Courtney L.; Annamma, Subini Ancy (2021). "Black families' resistance to deficit positioning: addressing the paradox of black parent involvement". Race Ethnicity and Education. 24 (5): 637–653. doi:10.1080/13613324.2021.1918403.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Winn, Maisha (25 Jul 2019). "Transforming Our Mission: Animating Teacher Education through Intersectional Justice". Theory into Practice. 58. doi:10.1080/00405841.2019.1626618.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Anyon, Yolanda; Joseph, Nicole M.; Farrar, Jordan; Greer, Eldridge; Downing, Barbara; Simmons, John (2019). "Black Girls and School Discipline: The Complexities of Being Overrepresented and Understudied". Urban Education. 54 (2): 211–242. doi:10.1177/0042085916646610.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy (2018). "Mapping Consequential Geographies in the Carceral State: Education Journey Mapping as a Qualitative Method With Girls of Color With Dis/abilities". Qualitative Inquiry. 24 (1): 20–34. doi:10.1177/1077800417728962.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Ferri, Beth A.; Connor, David J. (April 5, 2018). "Disability Critical Race Theory: Exploring the Intersectional Lineage, Emergence, and Potential Futures of DisCrit in Education". Review of Research in Education. 42 (1): 46–71.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy (2016). "Disrupting the carceral state through education journey mapping". International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 29 (9): 1210–1230. doi:10.1080/09518398.2016.1214297.
• Annamma, Subini Ancy; Morrison, Deb; Jackson, Darrell (2014). "Disproportionality Fills in the Gaps: Connections Between Achievement, Discipline, and Special Education in the School-to-Prison Pipeline". Berkeley Review of Education. 5 (1): 53–87. doi:10.5070/B85110003.

Awards

Year(s)	Award	Awarding Organization
2020	Critics Choice Book Award	American Educational Studies Association
2020	Emerging Scholar Award	Critical Race Studies in Education Association
2019	Alison Piepmeier Book Prize	National Women's Studies Association
2018–2019	Postdoctoral Fellow	Ford Foundation, University of California, Los Angeles
2018	Faculty Achievement Award for Promising Scholar	University of Kansas School of Education
2017	Division G Early Career Award	American Educational Research Association
2017	Outstanding Emerging Scholar Award	Western Social Science Association
2012–2013	Outstanding Doctoral Candidate of 2013	University of Colorado Boulder
2012–2013	Dissertation Minority Fellowship in Education Research Award	American Educational Research Association
2008	School of Education Fellowship	University of Colorado Boulder