CONTRIBUTOR:

Maria Ruiz-Martinez

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Doctoral Student

DEPARTMENT:

School of Education

INSTITUTION:

University of Colorado at Boulder

BIOGRAPHY:

María J. Ruíz-Martínez is a doctoral student in Equity, Bilingualism & Biliteracy in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interrogates the coloniality of belonging by examining how indigeneity and the interrelated categories of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and legal status impact the lives of Mexican transnational students. These lines of inquiry bring María to probe further how imposed identity labels and notions of citizenship work in concert to oppress, alienate and marginalize transnational students. She believes public scholarship is a tool to confront and reveal the material circumstances that deprive people of their humanity by moving away from hierarchical to dialogical ways of knowing and being. Prior to starting her doctoral program, María was a Spanish-English bilingual early childhood teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.