Sep 29, 2026 · 38 min · 13 segments
In this episode, we talked with Dr. Chandler Miranda. She is an Assistant Professor of Education at Molloy University, an anthropologist of education, and a former high school teacher. Her work is…
Chandler MirandaGuest
Eva ReyHost
I think the two that always come are front of mind for me when I think about how we write about people, how we write about policy, and how we write about ourselves and our work.
It's not typical anthropological texts, but writings that I come back to time and time again.
The first one being Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece that he wrote on reparations for the Atlantic many years ago.
The way that he uses one family's story to trace injustices at the policy level in particular to Black Americans in the South and then in housing in the North is so powerful and such a good, I think, teaching tool for students who want to understand why going deep into one place or one person's story is what we do rather than kind of looking broadly across cases or broadly, you know, accumulating lots of interviews with lots of people, but that going deep into one family's life, how it can help understand things like housing policy in the United States, right? And then secondly, the way that we write about our own positionality and our own experiences in our work, I think Eve Ewing's first chapter of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, which is about school closures in the South Side of Chicago, She was a student who went to school at public schools in the south side of Chicago and then was a teacher in the south side of Chicago and then did her PhD and was a professor at Harvard when she wrote this book.
And the way that she talks about how these her own experiences informed her view and informed the way that she asked questions, who she asked questions of, and how she went about exploring those questions in her study, I think is a really great teaching tool and resource for considering how we come to the studies that we come to as anthropologists and then that question of trustworthiness and how we write about ourselves in those studies.
me of how I would love to write and how I want my work to be digestible and, um, the audiences that I want to reach.
Beautifully for broader audiences than an, a particular sector of the Academy.
So it's a, I hope that if people read it, it's a pretty fast paced narrative.
It really relies on these, um, student stories, teacher stories and vignettes, and then has 25 ish pages of footnotes that if you want to learn more, you can dive into those.
And I've kind of written those as like a teachery reading list of sorts, but, um, but the narrative is, um, I think more storytelling, more letting you interpret the story as a reader and making meaning of it for your own context.
I think the two that always come are front of mind for me when I think about how we write about people, how we write about policy, and how we write about ourselves and our work.
It's not typical anthropological texts, but writings that I come back to time and time again.
The first one being Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece that he wrote on reparations for the Atlantic many years ago.
The way that he uses one family's story to trace injustices at the policy level in particular to Black Americans in the South and then in housing in the North is so powerful and such a good, I think, teaching tool for students who want to understand why going deep into one place or one person's story is what we do rather than kind of looking broadly across cases or broadly, you know, accumulating lots of interviews with lots of people, but that going deep into one family's life, how it can help understand things like housing policy in the United States, right? And then secondly, the way that we write about our own positionality and our own experiences in our work, I think Eve Ewing's first chapter of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, which is about school closures in the South Side of Chicago, She was a student who went to school at public schools in the south side of Chicago and then was a teacher in the south side of Chicago and then did her PhD and was a professor at Harvard when she wrote this book.
And the way that she talks about how these her own experiences informed her view and informed the way that she asked questions, who she asked questions of, and how she went about exploring those questions in her study, I think is a really great teaching tool and resource for considering how we come to the studies that we come to as anthropologists and then that question of trustworthiness and how we write about ourselves in those studies.
me of how I would love to write and how I want my work to be digestible and, um, the audiences that I want to reach.
Beautifully for broader audiences than an, a particular sector of the Academy.
So it's a, I hope that if people read it, it's a pretty fast paced narrative.
It really relies on these, um, student stories, teacher stories and vignettes, and then has 25 ish pages of footnotes that if you want to learn more, you can dive into those.
And I've kind of written those as like a teachery reading list of sorts, but, um, but the narrative is, um, I think more storytelling, more letting you interpret the story as a reader and making meaning of it for your own context.
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