About Me:
I’m Alexandria Lockhart—a U.S.-trained and certified educational psychologist, PhD candidate in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, and public scholar tracing the historical relationship between chattel slavery, racialized disablement, and contemporary special education systems in New York City while increasingly exploring these questions transatlantically.
Over the past decade, I’ve worked across U.S. public schools in Long Beach, Washington D.C., Baltimore, and New York City as a school psychologist, primarily within under-resourced communities. I’ve written psycho-educational reports, facilitated IEP meetings, conducted special education eligibility assessments, and witnessed firsthand how race, poverty, disability, and educational policy converge inside schools.
Alongside this work, I’ve spent years interrogating the historical foundations of school psychology and special education— particularly the ways these systems remain shaped by eugenics, anti-Blackness, colonialism, and the medicalization of difference. My writing and scholarship explore how educational systems often confuse structural violence for individual deficit.
My dissertation, Black Bodies as Currency: Examining the Commodification of the “Emotionally Disabled” Black Body from Slavery to Special Education in NYC Public Schools, examines how the slave plantation’s logic of economic valuation and social control continues to structure contemporary special education classifications, particularly Emotional Disturbance.
Through essays, collective study spaces, public scholarship, and historical analysis, I aim to make visible the architectures of racialized disablement that educational institutions often render invisible.
I am currently based in Madrid, Spain, where I continue my doctoral research, writing, and public scholarship across U.S. and transatlantic educational contexts.
What You’ll Find Here:
This is a space where scholarship meets public conversation.
Here, I write about race, disability, education, history, colonialism, and the ongoing afterlives of slavery in contemporary schooling systems. Some essays emerge from archival research and doctoral work. Others emerge from classrooms, conversations, memory, or the lived contradictions of working inside systems that were never designed for collective flourishing.
You’ll find:
Critical essays on race, disability, and education
Historical analysis of special education and classification
Public-facing scholarship grounded in doctoral research
Reflections on schooling, policy, identity, and power
Collective study projects and educational offerings
This Space Is For
Educators questioning the systems they work within
Parents and caregivers advocating for their children in special education
Scholars, researchers, and doctoral students
Disability justice organizers and advocates
Readers interested in history, education, race, and social theory
Anyone seeking deeper language for understanding how institutions shape human life
Contact
For speaking engagements, collaborations, workshops, or inquiries check out the booking page.
