Jalil Mustaffa Bishop is a PhD candidate in higher education and organizational change at University of California, Los Angeles in the school of education. His research focuses on the geography of education opportunity, student activism, and how ideologies of education opportunity mask Black people’s oppression. Jalil documents the ways anti-Blackness interlocks with common-sense ideas around meritocracy and whiteness. More importantly, he examines how marginalized people engage in acts of refusal, disruption, and spatialization that expose and even move beyond limiting notions of race and meritocracy, with a focus on the power dynamics of space and place in educational spaces be it K-12 schools or college campuses. Overall, Jalil challenges the common-sense idea that systems of schooling are spaces of escape from oppressive realities when in fact they often reproduce and expand them.
