Lalitha Vasudevan is Vice Dean for Digital Innovation and Managing Director of the Teachers College Digital Futures Institute, Professor of Technology and Education, and Founding Director of the Media and Social Change Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University. She also holds an affiliate faculty position in the Anthropology and Education program at Teachers College. Her work examines literacies, communication, and media practices of youth across settings and explores the role of digital media in young people’s educational trajectories and wellbeing.
She has engaged in participatory and ethnographic research with in classrooms, afterschool programs, detention facilities, alternatives to incarceration, and social service organizations; conducted professional development with K-12 teachers about the integration of technology and media into their pedagogy; and maintains long-term research-practice partnerships with organizations that are committed to improving the life chances for youth.
She is the co-editor of Arts, Media, and Justice: Multimodal Explorations with Youth (Peter Lang) and co-author of the book, Collaborative Research in Theory and Practice: The Poetics of Letting Go (Bristol University Press). In addition, Lalitha has authored publications in a number of outlets including Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Review of Research in Education, and Written Communication, and has produced multimedia works that promote multimodal scholarship, including a previous column in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and as a producer for the podcast series (Re)Search for Solutions, a podcast about gun violence interventions hosted by Prof. Sonali Rajan.
Lalitha is currently writing a collection of essays on juvenile justice, citizenship, and belonging titled, Citizen, Youth, and has previously served as an academic advisor for the Spencer Education Journalism Fellows program.