Ezekiel Dixon-Román

Ezekiel Dixon-Román is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s director of SP2’s Master of Science in Social Policy program and chair of the Data Analytics for Social Policy graduate certificate. His interdisciplinary scholarship is focused on the cultural studies of quantification and critical theories of difference. In particular, his research program seeks to make cultural and critical theoretical interventions toward rethinking and reconceptualizing the technologies and practices of quantification as mediums and agencies of systems of sociopolitical relations whereby race and other assemblages of difference are byproducts. He is particularly interested in how power and difference are reproduced, especially in bodily capacities, and the ways in which sociotechnical systems of quantification are working on, with, and in the body to produce racialized demarcations of which bodily capacities to regenerate and which to debilitate. He is also deeply interested in theoretical and methodological interventions toward developing alternative modes of inquiry and practices of quantification that might enable the potentialities of reconstituting sociopolitical relations and the movement and flow of social life. He is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education (2017, University of Minnesota Press), which received the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. He also co-guest edited “Alternative Ontologies of Number: Rethinking the Quantitative in Computational Culture” (2016, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies) and “The computational turn in education research: Critical and creative perspectives on the digital data deluge” (2017, Research in Education).