An Advocate for Public Education.

Amanda Anastasia Paniagua (she/they) is a proud first-generation college graduate born and raised in rural northwest Ohio. Growing up in a Mexican American ethnic enclave, she experienced poverty, classicism, and racism during her formative years but it wasn’t until college that she developed the language and scholarly aptitude to name these phenomena. The college going process, itself, was (and is) a testament to the ingenuity and spirit of perseverance (what education scholar Dr. Tara J. Yosso calls Community Cultural Wealth) Amanda carries with her.

Amanda is a PhD student in the Higher Education Administration program at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests center around the history of higher education law and institutional policies, equity, organizational development, student of color development, and student of color activism in higher education spaces. Her current dissertation project is using historical case study to examine the socio-political context in which the Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program was created in 1986 and subsequently renamed after the late Dr. Ronald E. McNair who died tragically aboard the Challenger.

Prior to pursuing higher education as an academic discipline/field, Amanda completed both a Bachelor’s (2012) and Master’s (2016) in Art History at Kent State University and tries to hone the skills obtained from the humanities to bridge her public scholarship with the social sciences.