Miguel Casar
Saludos,
My name is Miguel Casar, and I am a Mexican activist and scholar laboring as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. Compelled by a belief in the transformative power of education and the imperative to democratize inquiry and world-building, I work at the nexus of sociology of education, critical qualitative methodologies, and social movements. Inspired by critical, abolitionist, and decolonial traditions, my scholarship and movement work explore how reclaiming education as a practice of freedom can nurture collective praxis. Ultimately, I seek to work in solidarity with those actively resisting oppression to cultivate spaces where we can ask hard questions about our realities, build power, and democratically imagine and author more just and humanizing futures.
After more than 15 years of working with school communities across Mexico and the United States and accumulating questions at the nexus of education and broader social change, I joined UCLA to pursue my doctoral work. Afterwards, I served as the Dean’s Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Southern California, and in 2024, I joined the University of Alabama as an Assistant Professor of Critical Qualitative Research.
Today, I continue to work alongside abolitionist, decolonial, and youth-led movements, educators, and communities struggling to reclaim education, resist carceral violence, and exercise their right to the word and the world. Through these relationships and solidarities, I have the honor of learning from communities actively theorizing back against the conditions that seek to define and contain them, while exploring how carceral logics, surveillance, and relations of power shape educational institutions and democratic life. These experiences also animate my efforts to reimagine qualitative inquiry as a more collective, emancipatory practice of knowledge production and social transformation.
Across my research, teaching, and movement work, I remain committed to cultivating spaces of critical love, care, solidarity, and radical imagination, where we can question what is, confront what should not be, and collectively struggle toward what might become possible.
Importantly, I see all of my work as part of a much longer, unfinished history of collective struggle, and I aspire to honor those who have paved the way by continuing to learn, question, and labor alongside those imagining and building otherwise.
Lastly, in what sometimes feels like another life, yet one deeply entangled with all the others, I am also a climber, an adventurer, and a lover of the outdoors. In climbing, being outside, and learning from the land—especially when accompanied by others and in community—I find lessons about life, solidarity, our relationships with one another and the world, and the beauty that lives within our collective struggles for freedom. I love the challenges, wonder, and possibilities of being outdoors, and I am particularly committed to sharing these experiences with those whose relationships with land and the more-than-human world have been disrupted or severed by histories and ongoing structures of dispossession, exclusion, and enclosure. In many ways, these experiences remind me of why we do this work in the first place: not simply to resist what ought not be, but to nurture the relationships, joys, and possibilities of living otherwise.
Miguel Casar, and I am a Mexican activist and scholar laboring as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. Compelled by a belief in the transformative power of education and the imperative to democratize inquiry and world-building, I work at the nexus of sociology of education, critical qualitative methodologies, and social movements.