Heather McCambly
Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Education, Department of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy
412-383-0296
Heather McCambly is a mixed-methods, interdisciplinary scholar of higher education. She also studies the role of organizations in (re)producing systemic, racial inequalities. She draws on a range of analytic and interpretive methods to study the influence of aspiring change agents on institutionalized racial inequities in higher education practice and policy. She does this work with a commitment to producing knowledge that can help us, collectively, build alternative pathways toward just futures fo Black, brown, indigenous, and low-income students and institutions over time. Constructs central to her work include racialized organizations, institutional persistence and change, racial frames, political development and racial backlash, and organizational sensemaking.
Dr. McCambly’s current research asks: 1) What is and what could be the role of private philanthropy and public grantmaking in effecting racially just policy change in U.S. postsecondary education? and 2) Under what conditions do equity agendas address racialized inequalities rather than operating as new labels for old practices? She is a lso building up new lines of inquiry on the role of minority-serving community colleges as sites for political contestation of white-serving postsecondary histories.
As a first-generation college student, a community college graduate, and a multi-ethnic Latina, she is personally invested in generating clearer explanations for how, despite years of equity interventions, students of color continue to have limited access to life-affirming postsecondary experiences.