Raquel Lynne Jimenez

Raquel Jimenez is a lecturer on education and co-chair of the Arts and Learning Concentration at HGSE. Her interdisciplinary scholarship draws from the fields of education and cultural studies to consider how people engage with artmaking practices to make sense of shifting sociopolitical landscapes. Her book project Taking Up Space: Youth Culture and Creative Resistance in a Changing City addresses this theme in the context of urban gentrification, and explores how young people devise creative interventions to challenge patterns of spatialized injustice and how community arts education pedagogies structure this process. This work is based on her recent dissertation, which won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Dissertation award in the arts and learning and was supported by a Ford Foundation Fellowship.

Jimenez’s research and writing have been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Harvard Educational Review, Boston Art Review, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, and International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving. More broadly, Jimenez is also invested in community-engaged scholarship and service. She has co-chaired major initiatives at the National Guild for Community Arts Education and the Harvard Educational Review, and her approach to arts-based public pedagogy was recently profiled by the Boston Globe. Her work has received research funding and support from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Essex County Community Foundation among other sources.

In addition to her role at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jimenez maintains a postdoctoral appointment with the Social Science Research Council’s Arts Research with Communities of Color initiative, a major effort to build foundational research on the distinct logics that guide culturally-specific artmaking practices throughout the United States.