Michael V. Singh is an assistant professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies, where he teaches courses on race, gender, and education. He received his Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley in 2019 and was later a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Singh’s research is guided by questions of racial and gender justice in schools, with a focus on Latino men and boys. He has three primary areas of focus: (1) Ethnographic portraits of the educational lives of Latino men and boys in school-day and after-school programming, (2) Life-history narratives exploring the experiences of K-12 Latino men teachers, and (3) Conceptual research on race, power, and schooling.

 

Singh’s book, Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), comes from two years of ethnographic research with a school-based mentorship program for Latino boys. It tells the story of educational empowerment in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism. An insightful gender and race analysis, Good Boys, Bad Hombres sheds light on how approaches to school-based mentorship often react to the alleged crisis of Latino boys and are governed by the perceived remedies of the neoliberal state. Singh works to deconstruct male empowerment, arguing that new narratives and practices—beyond racial respectability and patriarchal redemption—are necessary for a reimagining of Latino manhood in schools and beyond.

 

Dr. Singh is also currently working on his second large-scale research project, which examines the ways race, gender, and sexuality shape the lives and teaching practices of Latino men who are K-12 teachers. Overall, Dr. Singh’s work provides a timely addition to the growing research on boys and young men of color and calls for intersectional and justice-centered approaches to Latino male education.