Brayboy to Deliver AERA Distinguished Lecture
Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, dean of Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy, will present the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Distinguished Lecture, one of the signature events of the 2026 Annual Meeting.
The conference, centered around remembering history and rethinking the future vision of education research, will be held April 8–12, in Los Angeles.
Brayboy's talk, titled “Re-memory, Genealogy, and Dreams for the Future,” will examine how schools have tried to assimilate Indigenous peoples and consider what lessons from that history can help individuals and communities shape their own futures.
An anthropologist of education by training, he explores the role of race and diversity in higher education and how culture and cultural practices can support Indigenous students and communities.
Brayboy, the Carlos Montezuma Professor, is an AERA Fellow and member of the National Academy of Education. At the 2025 Annual Meeting he served as a panelist in the Opening Plenary session, which focused on the future of higher education in polarized times.
He is the author of more than 110 scholarly documents, including nine edited or authored volumes in addition to articles, book chapters, and policy briefs for the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences.
He recently coauthored the study “Ethnographic Methods: Training norms and practices and the future of American anthropology,” which was the most-read article of 2024 in American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.
Brayboy's AERA sessions:
- Refusals of Erasure: Centering Indigenous Resurgence as Survivance in TE, Wednesday, April 8, 5:45 p.m. CDT.
- 2026 AERA Distinguished Lecture, Thursday, April 9 at 6:30 p.m. CDT.
- Indigenous Educational Sovereignty and Culturally Responsive, Sustaining, and Revitalizing Pedagogies: A Seven-Generations View, Friday, April 10, 1:45 p.m. CDT