Celina Su

Celina Su is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She received a Ph.D. in Urban Studies from MIT and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.

Dr. Su's interests lie in the role of civil society in social policy, especially in the interaction of culture, grassroots groups, and education or health care policy-making. Her most recent research focused on five education organizing groups in the South Bronx facing the same political constraints and similar funding levels; it delineates the ways in which cultural norms help to shape the groups' wildly different political strategies.

In the past, Dr. Su has engaged in other projects examining the role of social institutions in policy, at MIT, the Brookings Institution, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She currently also serves as a Program Officer for the Burmese Refugee Project.

Streetwise for Book Smarts: Community Organizing, and Education Reform

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While these education organizing groups had similar goals and worked in the same political context, they frequently employed divergent political strategies in their campaigns. My talk will draw upon 18 months of ethnographic research I conducted with four education organizing groups in the South Bronx. It will focus on the ways in which the groups’ organizational toolkits made a difference, and how grassroots organizations can work more effectively towards substantive social change.

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