Cindy Cruz is an associate professor in the Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies Department in the College of Education at the University of Arizona and a member of the editorial collective of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA, was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, and faculty at UC Santa Cruz. Her research centers the narratives of homeless queer and trans*youth in Los Angeles, California. Her theoretical foundations center the work of U.S. feminists of color and Latinx and decolonial feminist theory. In a previous life, she was a high school English teacher and HIV counselor and this experience greatly influences her research and pedagogy. Her current projects include gentrification, mobility, surveillance, and the use of geo-spatial applications amongst homeless youth. She is also concerned with the pedagogy of feminist writing and youth research and ethnography. Dr. Cruz has been honored with several academic prizes, including the Antonia I. Castañeda Prize, the Golden Apple for Teaching Excellence, and AERA's Queer Special Interest Group Article of the Year.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Critical ethnography, gender and education, race and education, LGBTQ street youth, reflexive ethnography, urban youth cultures, resistance and infrapolitics, US women of color theory.
TEACHING INTERESTS
Qualitative methodologies, critical and feminist epistemologies, gender and education, race and ethnicity in schools, critical ethnography, writing, educational foundations.
Selected Publications
Cruz, C. (2020). Reporting Data to Recognize the Complexity and Multiplicity of Youth Lives. In Teresa McCarty and Arshad Ali (Eds), Research Methods in Critical Youth Studies: A Practical Guide.
Cruz, C. (2020). Spaces of Collision: Intersectionalities of Race, Gender Identities and Generations. Interview by Cris Mayo in Queer, Trans, and Intersectional Theory in Educational Practice: Student, Teacher, and Community Experiences. New York: Routledge Press.
Cruz, C. (2019). Reading This Bridge Called My Back for pedagogies of coalition, remediation, and a razor’s edge. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32:2, 136-150, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2018.1533150
Cruz, C. (2016). When Does Resistance Begin?: Queer Latino Youth and the Infrapolitics of the Street. In Gilberto Conchas (Ed) Cracks in the SchoolYard: Confronting Latino Education Inequality (131-143). New York: Teacher's College Press.
Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ street youth doing resistance in infrapolitical worlds. In K. Wayne Yang and E. Tuck (Eds.) Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change (pp. 209-217). New York: Routledge.
Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ youth of color video making as radical curriculum: A brother mourning his brother and a theory in the flesh. Curriculum Inquiry 43(4), 441-460.