Ujju Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning in the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students, and an affiliate faculty member in Global Studies and the Department of Anthropology. She also serves as Coordinator of BPATS' Self-Directed Learning Program.
Aggarwal’s research examines questions related to public infrastructures, urban space, racial capitalism, rights, gender, and the state. Her first book, Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education is forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press, 2024. Aggarwal's next project, Education Against Enclosure, is supported by the Spencer Foundation. Her work has appeared in popular outlets, scholarly journals, and edited volumes including Transforming Anthropology; Scholar & Feminist Online; Educational Policy, and Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion, and Change (edited by Leela Fernandes). She is co-editor (with Edwin Mayorga and Bree Picower), of What’s race got to do with it? How current school reform policy maintains racial and economic inequality 2nd Edition (Peter Lang, 2020); and co-editor (with Linta Varghese and Rupal Oza) of Women’s Studies Quarterly Fall/Winter 2019.
Prior to joining The New School, Aggarwal was Visiting Joanne Woodward Chair in Public Policy at Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Vermont Center for Fine Arts and has also taught at Hunter College (CUNY) and Educational Opportunities Center (SUNY). Her research has been supported by the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis (African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas, Austin), the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CUNY Graduate Center), and the Davis Putter Fund.
In addition to her academic training, Aggarwal also brings a long history of work as a community organizer and popular educator. For over two decades, she has worked to build organizations that work for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, abolition and transformative justice as well as projects that focus on the intersection of arts and social justice, popular education, and adult literacy.
She currently serves on the Board of Teachers Unite, on the Advisory Board Member of the Parent Leadership Project (Bloomingdale Family Head Start Center, PLP), on the Advisory Board Member of PARCEO (Participatory Action-Research Center for Education, Organizing), and as a mentor to National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation doctoral and postdoctoral fellows.
