Hilary Hughes

I'm an assistant professor of Middle Grades Education in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice in the College of Education at University of Georgia. My research and teaching interests focus on educating young adolescents and critical youth studies; feminist pedagogies in compassionate, equity oriented teacher education; theories around the body; and phenomenology as a philosophy and methodology. I have been teaching in elementary, middle, high school, and university classrooms since 1995, and I taught 7th and 8th grade language arts, specifically, for 5 years in Colorado.

I believe in our youth, and I am an advocate for our youth. To me, young adolescents are the most astute observers of equity and social justice, because they are, as a category, incredibly marginalized--so they live out injustices every day. I also try to learn from youth as often as possible, because they still embody that sense of empowerment and agency that some of us might have given up on by the time its taught out of us in schools.