Price Mellon Research Fellow
2016
2017

Ezekiel Dixon-Román

 Associate Professor of Social Policy

Ezekiel Dixon-Román is an Associate Professor of Social Policy in the School of Social Policy & Practice. He also has secondary appointments in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Africana Studies and is an affiliated faculty member in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program and the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Dr. Dixon-Román is also an invited institute associate of the Taos Institute, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to the development of social constructionist theory and practices for purposes of world benefit. His research interests are on the cultural studies of education, quantification, and social policy. He maintains a program of research examining social reproduction in human learning and development and the critical philosophical questioning and reconceptualizing of quantification. Dr. Dixon-Román has published in leading social science and education journals such as The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Urban Education, and Teachers College Record and is the lead editor (with Edmund W. Gordon) of Thinking Comprehensively About Education: Spaces of Educative Possibility and Their Implications for Public Policy. Ezekiel Dixon-Román is also the author of the forthcoming book Inheriting ImPossibility: New Materialisms, Quantitative Inquiry, & Social Reproduction in Education with University of Minnesota Press.

In order to begin demonstrating the powerful utility of digital humanist methods for policy studies, Dr. Dixon-Román is collaborating with Scott Dexter (of Brooklyn College) on a new project using topic modeling to analyze the ways in which race has been discursively constituted and reconfigured in policy-related text over several decades. In particular, we are taking all of the articles ever published in top policy journals such as the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the flagship journal for the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and employing latent dirichlet allocation to topic model these texts with a particular interest in if and how race comes up as a latent topic and how it historically evolves.