Research

My scholarship is animated by questions about the relationship between education, power, and the possibilities of collective transformation. Working at the intersections of sociology of education, critical qualitative inquiry, and social movements, I explore how education can become both a geography of domination and a practice of freedom.

Across my work, I have sought to understand how young people and communities resist the conditions that seek to define, discipline, and contain them; how carceral logics and relations of power shape educational institutions and democratic life; and how reclaiming the right to inquire, theorize, and author our worlds can nurture emancipatory possibilities.

My research draws from and contributes to critical, abolitionist, and decolonial traditions, and is deeply informed by longstanding relationships with communities struggling for educational and social justice. Increasingly, my work also seeks to reimagine qualitative inquiry itself: its purposes, its politics, and its possibilities as a collective practice of world-building.

Selected publications

2026

Casar, M., & Guyotte, K. (2026). (Re)Orienting Ourselves Toward What Ought to Be: Democratizing Qualitative Inquiry as Hopeful World-Building. Qualitative Inquiry. DOI.

Casar, M. (2026). Theorizing Back: (Re)Envisioning Schools as Sites for Democratizing World-Building. In Theoharis, G., & Rogers, J. (ed.), Educating in “A Very Dangerous Time”: A call to re-envision America’s public schools. Beacon Press.

Accepted

Casar, M., & Sanchez, S. (accepted). “Come Visit With Us”: Troubling Time, Violent Temporalities, and the Teaching of Qualitative Inquiry. Departures in Critical Qualitative Inquiry.

Bridgeforth, J., Uka, A., Casar, M., & Marsh, J. (accepted). Democracy For What and For Whom?: The Possibilities and Challenges of K-12 School Boards. AERA Open. Working paper (2025) PDF.

2025

Casar, M., & Noguera, J. M. S. (2025). Who speaks for whom? The right to the word and why it matters. Theory Into Practice, 1–14. DOI. Article of the Year Award, Theory Into Practice, 2025.

Casar, M., & Lopez, E. (2025). “Who you are is critical to YPAR!”: Teacher histories, identities, and Youth Participatory Action Research in K–12 schools. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 1–24. DOI. Online-first citation.

Casar, M. (2025). “Never had a chance to imagine a future where I could be free”; Theorizing Back and the right to the word and the world. In Abad, M., & Conchas, G. Q. (Eds.), Youth Resistance for Educational Justice: Pedagogical Dreaming from the Classroom to the Streets (1st ed.). Routledge. Chapter DOI.

Educational Justice Coalition. (2025). Who Has the Power? Chronicling Los Angeles County’s Systemic Failures to Educate Incarcerated Youth. Report PDF.

2023

Stacy, J., & Casar Rodriguez, M. (2023). A Reconfigured Panopticon: COVID-19, Virtual Schooling, and Regulation of Our Homes. Teachers College Record, 125(10), 31–55. DOI.

2022

Casar Rodriguez, M., Sasner, C., & Graham, F. (2022). Nothing about us without us; Youth Voice, Power, and Participation in East Side Union. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. Report · PDF.

Research and commitments

• Critical qualitative research. Asking whose knowledge and lived experience count in education.
• Youth participation. Involving young people in research and decisions about their education.
• Democracy and education. Studying public school governance and educational justice.

Selected work

CV · Teaching · Service & collective commitments