Rachael D. Stephens
Hi, my name is Rachael.
I'm a long-time resident of Greater Hartford (both Hartford and its suburbs), and have been conducting community research in the area since 2014. I hope my long-term engagement in Greater Hartford will support residents’ efforts to build a more equitable future.
I’m currently a doctoral student at UPenn (Philadelphia, PA) in the Education, Culture, and Society program (GSE) and Department of Anthropology (SAS). My main interests are U.S. political economic inequity, social change (in relation to politicization, ideology, discourse, etc.), and social ethics. l am committed to trying to better understand--and more effectively transgress--the processes through which we learn to continually re-make our inequitable realities.
My dissertation is an ethnography of public-school finance inequality, and was inspired by my work as an educator, community organizer, and filmmaker in under-funded public schools in Hartford, CT, and Philadelphia, PA. It explores the concrete interactions that sustain the so-called "real estate market," residential property relations (including valuation and taxation), public finance (including school finance), and perhaps most especially, the public discourses that narrate such phenomena. This focus allows me to consider contemporary technologies of social differentiation (particularly race-making and related taxonomies of citizenship) as they relate to the late liberal mode of production.
Before my doctoral work, I received my M.A. in Education and Anthropology from Teachers College, Columbia University (NYC, New York). At UPenn, I am a member of CAMRA (a collective for multi-modal research and scholarship) and CEE (the Center for Experimental Ethnography).
Outside of academia, I'm an unabashed "cat lady" who has "failed" to move out of Connecticut more times than I can count (somehow I always get pulled back!). I spend most of my free time doing muay thai, filmmaking, photography, or binge-listening to podcasts on biophysics and energy healing. I'm continuously trying to learn how to better balance my life outside and inside of academia, and am genuinely grateful that I get to do ethnography for my job. It is, after all, a fancy word for "hanging out" with people and learning what each person can teach us about the world we all share. Please don't hesitate to reach out!