Contact Name

Theresa Metz, Diversity Engagement Coordinator and Bridge Student Advisory Committee

Contact Phone

573-882-0511

Contact Email

MizzouEdBridge@missouri.edu

Speaker(s) Information

Dr. Amalia Dache-Gerbino is an Afro-Cubana Latina scholar who is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis Department at The University of Missouri’s College of Education. Her experiences as a former Cuban refugee and student traversing U.S. educational systems, such as inner-city K-12 schools, community college, state college and a private research intensive university inform her professional experiences. She earned her Ph.D. from University of Rochester’s Margaret Warner School of Education. Her major research areas include the postcolonial geographic contexts of higher education, activism and education and college access and transition of low-income, Black and Latina/o students in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Dache-Gerbino was awarded the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s (ASHE) 2014 Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year. Her dissertation is titled, The Labyrinth in the Metropole: A Postcolonial Mixed-Method Study of College Access and Choice. Her most recent co-authored publication “College students or criminals? A postcolonial geographic analysis of the social field of whiteness at an urban community college branch campus and suburban main campus,” is published in Community College Review  (Dache-Gerbino & White, 2016) addresses how racialization and geography conflate in college access discourses. Her co-authored book chapter entitled, “When violence interferes with educational opportunity: Latinas’ narratives of resistance and agency” in Harris and Kiyama’s (2015) book The Plight of Invisibility: A Community-based Approach to Understanding the Educational Experiences of Urban Latina/os pushes readers to re-conceptualize violence and understand symbolic violence contributing to the educational experiences of Latina students.

Currently, Dr. Dache-Gerbino is a Co-Principal Investigator on a research study titled “Teaching from the Margins: Mapping Ferguson’s Community Cultural Wealth as Public Education.” This study seeks to intersect critical geography and media discourse as public education to provide insight into community resistance after the killing of Michael Brown.