Bianca J. Baldridge

Bianca J. Baldridge is an associate professor of education with expertise in community-based education and critical youth work practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a sociologist of education, Baldridge’s research explores the sociopolitical context of community-based youth work and critically examines the confluence of race, class, and gender and their impact on educational reforms that shape community-based spaces engaging Black and Latine youth. In addition, she explores the organizational and pedagogical practices employed by youth work professionals amid educational reforms and restructuring.

Baldridge’s first book, Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work (Stanford University Press), examines how racialized, market-based reforms undermine the efforts of Black community-based organizations to support comprehensive youth development opportunities. Her book received the 2019 Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association. With the support of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship program, Baldridge investigated how racial disparity discourse influences community-based spaces that engage Black youth in predominantly white cities that espouse a liberal and progressive ethos. Her second book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work (Stanford University Press), examines the pivotal role of Black youth workers in the lives of young people and the challenges they face in an unstable and often underappreciated position. Her current research examines 1) broader issues of equity facing the out-of-school time (OST) sector nationally, 2) the precarity of the youth work profession and how Black youth workers navigate anti-Blackness, and 3) how Black community-based youth organizations respond to city change and displacement fueled by gentrification and educational restructuring.

Baldridge’s research appears in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal, Review of Research in Education, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, and Race, Ethnicity, and Education. Baldridge’s experiences as a youth work professional in US cities and abroad also profoundly inform her research.

With a deep commitment to engaged research and disrupting oppressive youth development spaces, Baldridge works with several out-of-school-time networks and facilitates ‘communities of practice’ with organizational leaders and youth development professionals nationwide to sustain justice-oriented and humanizing youth work practices.