Carnegie Mellon University

Intimate Interventions Contested Futures

Intimate Interventions Contested Futures

Early Education and the Politics of Youth in the US


Tuesday, October 30
Baker Hall 246-A
4:30pm Lecture

A lecture by:
Dario Valles

Inequalities begin at birth and, early education is a critical site for narrowing the educational achievement gap between white and non-white U.S students. For his dissertation, Valles conducted three years of ethnographic research among black and Latin American migrant childcare providers in Los Angeles, who care for families in the welfare system as they organized a union. Providers’ experiences reveal the ways in which early childhood education is riddled with cultural flashpoints regarding broader national debates on immigration, shifting racial and gendered politics, global economic competition and public interventions into private life. Angeleno providers’ intimate labor and education activism provides scholars and policymakers in the present with grassroots visions of the possibilities for a future multicultural and equitable education system.


Dario Valles is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Race and Ethnicity at Brown University. He holds a joint appointment at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA). Dario Valles recently completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Northwestern University and has taught and lead research projects and published at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).