Tanishia Lavette Williams is an education stratification scholar whose work examines how educational institutions classify people and knowledge, allocate resources, structure access, and assign value, with attention to race, gender, political economy, curriculum, assessment, and the global circulation of American educational ideas. Working across history, data visualization, and critical visual analysis, she investigates how images, charts, statistics, and narratives render hierarchy visible, natural, or contestable. Her projects include The Color of Achievement, which examines representation in New York’s U.S. history curriculum and Regents examinations, and Neural Narratives, a study of how historical imagery shapes bias, empathy, and interpretation. Her historical work also traces the intellectual and institutional development of American education, including its competing purposes and intended beneficiaries. Across these projects, Williams asks who education is imagined to be for, what it is expected to accomplish, and how those purposes become embedded in institutions, images, and systems of differentiated opportunity.
