dinorah sánchez loza is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning. Her work is guided by one central question: What relationship exists between schooling and how youth come to think and act politically?  Her research agenda has three broad areas of focus: (1) theories of settler colonialism and its resultant structuring of race, gender, and political/economic relations; (2) democracy and its limits within a racialized/colonial public sphere; and (3) the teaching and learning of politics and civic engagement. An ethnography, her most recent project examines US Government classrooms in two predominantly white, yet economically different high schools in central Ohio and interrogates the everyday lived experiences within them to analyze how schooling intersects with race and class to (re)produce political ideologies and practices.  It investigates how issues of citizenship, democracy, and politics are taught and learned and how schooling experiences foster differential levels of understanding, power, and engagement in the public sphere.  

dr. sánchez loza has received the National Academy of Sciences/Ford Foundation Dissertation fellowship. While at Berkeley, she was selected into the Graduate Fellows Program through the Institute for the Study of Social Issues, received funding from Center for Right Wing Studies and the Graduate Division, and was awarded the multi-year Eugene Cota Robles Fellowship.  She has also been a recipient of the Arthur Zankel Fellowship through Teachers College, Columbia University and selected to participate in the International Fellows Program through the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Most recently, she has received grant funding through The Women’s Place at the Ohio State University to continue her analysis of political ideologies among White adolescent girls across two schools in central Ohio. 

A veteran educator, dr. sánchez loza taught English Language Arts and Drama in an urban high school in south east Los Angeles and has since taught English to various age groups in Japan, provided professional development to teachers in the Dominican Republic, and designed and facilitated a critical research camp with high school students in Oakland, CA.

Selected Publication

sánchez loza, d. (2025). Disidentification & Deviance: Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth experiences with and resistances to hostile civics in a small-town high school. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Abdi, N., sánchez loza, d., & Vue, K. (2024). (De)Coloniality of Mothering: Race, Gender, and Mothers in Schools. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 11(5), 98-116.

sánchez loza, d. (2023). Tracking Race, Tracking Settlerness: Theorizing the political project of racialization and uncovering settler tracks in civic education. In K. Wayne Yang and Eve Tuck (Eds.), Theories of blackness, indigeneity, and racialization in research to reduce inequality in the lives of young people (pp. 63-76). Routledge.

sánchez loza, d. (2023). Political Neutrality as Ideal, Right-wing Pedagogy in Practice: Hegemony and Civic  Learning Opportunities in Predominantly White Schools. Peabody Journal of Education, 1-15.

sánchez loza, d. (2021). Dear “good” schools: White supremacy and political education in predominantly white and affluent suburban schools. Theory Into Practice, 1-12.