Michelle S. Pérez

Michelle Salazar Pérez is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at The University of Texas at Austin. She uses women of color feminisms to inform her community collaborations, research, and pedagogy in early childhood studies. These perspectives not only critically orient her work, but they also foreground the urgency to re-envision the field to support culturally sustaining praxis and programs for minoritized young children. Michelle’s work has been published in Teachers College Record, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, and Review of Research in Education. She has co-edited several special issues and books, including an issue of Global Studies of Childhood, which centers global south onto-epistemologies in childhood studies. Michelle is the recipient of the 2020, AERA Mid-Career Award, from the Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Education SIG. She was also the Host Chair of the 27th international Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) conference in 2019, and the Chair of the AERA Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education (CPECE) SIG in 2018.