ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ®

Overview 
To review my most recent CV, please click . If you would like to connect to discuss potential research collaborations, please contact me at cnorton@umd.edu. 

Background
My name is Cody Norton (he/they), and I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership department, specializing in Teacher Education and Professional Development. Before graduate school, I worked as an elementary teacher for 11 years in Washington, DC. I then served as an instructional coach for the teacher preparation program City Teaching Alliance, coordinator in the Content and Curriculum division for DC Public Schools, and curriculum writer for the DC History Center. My primary research interest focuses on examining how the intersection of community organizing, critical pedagogy, and teacher preparation can lead to movement-building experiences focused on abolitionist frameworks. I earned an A.A. in Humanities from Jamestown Community College, a B.A. in Sociology from Ithaca College, and an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from George Mason University. 

In addition to my background in education, I took on roles as an organizer in various capacities. I worked with the DC Education Coalition for Change (DCECC) to secure millions of dollars of funding for community school programs in Washington, DC, successfully advocated for reforms to the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) school STAR rating system with EmpowerEd, and championed increased health and safety protections for public school teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic as a member of the Washington Teacher's Union (WTU). Currently, I am a labor organizer for the ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ®Graduate Labor Union in their campaign for union recognition and collective bargaining rights.

Positionality
I am a White, queer, working-class male. Although I recognize the ways in which all identities influence my lived experience, the four I named have felt the most salient to me. As a queer, working-class person, I have personally experienced the ways institutions have diminished, erased, and at times, tokenized the legacies of these groups. I know the sense of alienation and fear that accompanies speaking and acting against these institutional power structures, whose ability to silence you and end your career at a moment’s notice, without hesitation, is a minute-by-minute reality. I have also seen the ways in which symbolic gestures, such as LGBTQ+ pride posts or advice on how to add pronouns to email signatures, do nothing to change the lived experience of queer people at universities. I cannot recall instances where my working-class identity was ever affirmed or acknowledged. Yet, despite these challenges, I employ a critical Whiteness framework to explain how White males have been historically and socially situated to access and wield structural power by shaping racial hierarchies and systems like racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Even with my marginalized identities, when coupled with Whiteness, the barriers I encounter are often mitigated in comparison to women, femmes, and people of color.

Research Orientation
My commitment to action reflects my lenses as a critical and postmodern researcher, and through the ongoing ways I have demonstrated solidarity with marginalized communities with whom I do not share an identity. As a critical and postmodern researcher, I approach my commitment to action with a reflexive lens, continuously questioning dominant narratives and power structures while acknowledging the complexities of identity and representation. I problematize how hegemonic ways of knowing uphold restrictive binaries and punish individuals and communities who resist those binaries, which often means punishing resistance to Whiteness and White supremacy. I make this commitment because I have seen and experienced ways that Whiteness and Whiteness supremacy can also be weaponized against White European Americans. I don’t make this previous statement to show that the contingency to my solidarity extends only to situations in which White people may be subjected to harm; instead, I make this argument to show that, at the core, I argue that violence and destruction are foundational principles of Whiteness and White supremacy, and a part of my ongoing humanity relies on my active resistance against systems dedicated to violent, destructive hierarchies.