Lisa (Leigh) Patel is a researcher, educator, and writer. With a background in sociology, she researches and teaches about education as a site of social reproduction and as a potential site for transformation. She is an Associate Professor of Education at Boston College and works extensively with recently immigrated youth and teacher activists. Prior to working in the academy, Professor Patel was a journalist, a teacher, and a state-level policymaker. Across all of these experiences, her focus has been on the ways that education structures opportunities in society, and her daily work has been with youth who are marginalized through those structures.

Professor Patel, also published under Lisa Patel Stevens, is the author of Youth Held at the Border: Immigration, Education and the Politics of Inclusion, the forthcoming Anti-Colonial Educational Research:L From Ownership to Answerability, co-author of Critical Literacy: Context, Research, and Praxis in the K-12 Classroom (Sage) and co-editor of ReConsructing the Adolescent: Sign, Symbol and Body (Peter Lang Publishers). She has authored dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters and has been a consistent voice in educational policymaking and policy analysis over a number of years. Her writing has also been featured in media outlets including The Feminist Wire, Racialicious.com and HuffPost Live. She is a national board member of Education for Liberation, a long-standing organization dedicated to transformative education for marginalized populations.

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