Ali Blake
Assistant Professor
Contact
Bio
As an arts educator, organizer, and learning scientist, Ali R. Blake (they/them) brings together creative practices, learning theory, queer and trans studies, and their participation in queer and trans communities to study relationality in multidimensional queer and trans struggles for social transformation. Through micro-ethnographic, participatory, and creative methodologies, they're interested in how people organize for each other's learning—in all the messiness—in these spaces of cultural production toward designing for more just and nourishing creative learning experiences. In Boston, they organized QTthreads, a queer and trans communal clothing making space rooted in multi-dimensional commitments to self-determination. Ali is especially looking forward to getting to know spaces in the city where folks are continuing to engage COVID-mitigation practices as a vital dimension of dreaming a more livable world.
Ali studied Textiles at Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) before studying Arts in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Ed.M.) and Curriculum & Instruction at Boston College (PhD). Their multimodal research can be found in Bank Street’s Occasional Paper Series; Digital Culture and Education; Mind, Culture, and Activity; and more publications.
Work
Panel excerpt from Socrates and Me, a comic collaboration with Per Sia, a founding performer with Drag Story Hour, published as part of a set of comics on Stories from Trans Educators with Bank Street Occasional Paper Series.