---
title: "Miguel Casar"
description: "Mexican activist and scholar. Education, inquiry and collective transformation."
---

> Page index: https://mcasar.com/llms.txt

# Miguel Casar

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Saludos,

My name is Miguel Casar, and I am a Mexican activist and scholar laboring as an Assistant Professor at the [University of Alabama](https://education.ua.edu/directory/miguel-casar-rodriguez/). 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](/research/), [critical qualitative methodologies](/research/critical-qualitative-inquiry/), and [social movements](/service/). 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.

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[CV](/cv/) · [Substack](https://substack.com/@mcasar)

```text
mcasar@ua.edu
```

[Email Miguel](mailto:mcasar@ua.edu)

## Explore the work

- [Research](/research/) — Research questions and selected publications.
- [Teaching](/teaching/) — Pedagogy and selected courses.
- [Service](/service/) — Academic service and collective commitments.
- [Media](/media/) — Film, photography and published commentary.
- [CV](/cv/) — Academic background and curriculum vitae.

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## About this website

See what this file carries, follow the sources, and change the way you read it.

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### A page visit you can observe

Research has its own page and address. Opening the folder navigates there; the site can fetch that page or reuse a copy already held in memory.

The research excerpt below is included in this homepage. The full Research page remains a separate destination. External research sites are links, not embedded previews.

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### How these numbers are obtained

The large figure uses decodedBodySize from a matching timing record for the current HTML response, when one is available: the uncompressed response body, in kB (1 kB = 1,000 bytes). It does not include separately fetched styles, scripts, fonts or images. No stored prototype byte count is reused.

The first page arrival uses Navigation Timing. A page fetched during navigation needs its own response record; reusing a stored page is not a new HTML transfer. If no matching response record is supplied, its size is shown as unavailable. Resource Timing records describe observed requests since that page’s arrival. Reported transfer includes browser-estimated response-header overhead; cached files can report zero transfer and cross-origin sizes may be hidden. Missing values are not treated as zero.

The Research test observes completed resource records from just before visiting Research until this homepage returns, including requests made on the way back. Other requests in that interval may also be included; later requests are outside the observation. The result distinguishes a page request, reuse of a stored page and an unreported source when that information is available. Leaving for another page, reloading or an incomplete recording ends the test without claiming a count. It does not measure electricity, CPU work, other tabs or external pages. No result is sent to a server.

[Read the browser measurement documentation](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PerformanceResourceTiming/transferSize)

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### Source provenance

A research focus, a public research source and verified academic background are not the same thing.

Choose a label to see how this website makes the distinction.

- **Research focus.** An overview of the research approach, not a separately published paper. The website keeps that difference visible.
- **Public research.** The public source opens on its own website. This page introduces the work; it does not replace the original.
- **Verified background.** The CV page presents supplied academic qualifications and selected research. The original English and Spanish CVs are available as dated documents.

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### Another way to read

Switch views. The research text and its links stay the same.

Markdown is plain text with visible headings and links. People can read it, too.

One research passage, two formats. Generated from the text already in this page. The passage is this site’s research-focus note, and it has its own readable file:

[Read the research-focus note as Markdown](/research/critical-qualitative-inquiry/index.md)

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### No measured carbon score

This page reports its document size and browser activity. It does not measure the electricity used by your device, the network or hosting. An emissions estimate needs those assumptions, so no carbon score is shown here.

[What a carbon estimate would need](https://sustainablewebdesign.org/estimating-digital-emissions/)

Source: https://mcasar.com/index.mdx