Rae Stevenson is an Assistant Professor of Community, Youth, and Education Studies in the Department of Education at Clark University. Her research examines Black childhood, schooling, and grief through arts-based, participatory, and digital methodologies grounded in Black feminist, decolonial, and queer theory.
Her dissertation, Twisted Garden, is a comics anthology co-created with seven Black high school students in New Orleans examining their experiences within the city’s all-charter public school system. The project received the 2025 Dissertation of the Year Award from the Arts-Based Educational Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association. She is also a published children’s book author and comics writer whose creative work engages loss and speculative narrative.
Stevenson’s current scholarship theorizes Black youth grief as a structural condition of schooling in the afterlife of slavery, drawing on Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and abolitionist education scholars. Her broader research agenda asks what it means to be recognized as a knower and what forms of language, method, and encounter make that recognition possible. Grounded in youth participatory action research and critical childhood studies, her work bends research toward young people rather than requiring youth to translate themselves into academic forms.
Stevenson holds an interdisciplinary PhD in City, Culture, and Community from Tulane University and a BA from Portland State University.