Brayboy Elected to AERA Leadership
Northwestern University’s Bryan Brayboy, a world renowned scholar on race, diversity, and Indigenous experiences in education, was elected to the American Educational Research Association's council and executive board.
Brayboy, an educational anthropologist, is the Dean of the School of Education and Social Policy and the Carlos Montezuma Professor. He recently received the George and Louise Spindler Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education for a lifetime of work shaping the educational anthropology field, K-12 schools, and higher education.
In 2018 he was elected to the National Academy of Education and named a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.
In addition to Brayboy, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar of the University of California, Los Angeles, was voted to a member-at-large position. Maisha T. Winn of the University of California, Davis, is the organization's new president-elect. Their terms begin April 15, at the end of the association’s 2025 annual meeting.
"Bryan is uniquely positioned to lead in this role as he has been a boundary crosser professionally and personally, tackling boldly the persistent challenges of our times and the role of education in such work," said Carol Lee, Edwina S. Tarry Professor Emerita at SESP and president of the National Academy of Education.
Brayboy is well known for his rich theoretical grounding and rigorous research methods, as well as his humor, humility, and genuine enthusiasm for his work. His most influential scholarship is Tribal Critical Race Theory or TribalCrit, a groundbreaking framework he developed in 2005. TribalCrit is a framework to guide examinations of relationships among how race, power and indigenous tribal sovereignty intersect.
In addition to TribalCrit, a globally cited classic in Indigenous studies, Brayboy’s research on Indigenous knowledge systems in schools helps explain how people learn, teach, and define themselves in relationship with powerful systems and structures.
His 25-year academic career has been characterized as an investment in people within higher education and work they will do with its resources, well beyond the institution.
Brayboy has received several AERA distinctions throughout his career, including the Scholars of Color Early Career Contribution Award, the Division G: Social Contexts in Education Early Career Award, and the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the American Educational Research Journal Section on Social and Institutional Analysis.
Complete 2024 AERA election results are posted on the AERA website.
Read more about Brayboy in the latest issue of SESP Magazine.