NCID-0912
Jon Iftikar
Assistant Professor of Practice
Oregon State University
Education/Degree:
1 Curriculum and Instruction Curriculum and Instruction (University of Wisconsin Madison)
About
Jon S. Iftikar was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a degree in Asian American Studies. He then earned a J.D. with a concentration in Critical Race Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and moved to Boston where he worked as an instructor with the Asian American Studies program while receiving an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Boston. He then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, with a minor in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While there, he also worked as a first-year college composition instructor and later as an undergraduate academic advisor. He most recently worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Graduate Program Chair for the Student Affairs and Higher Education M.S. Distance Program at Indiana State University, where he was previously a Pre-Doctoral Fellow.
Current Work
Dr. Iftikar’s research agenda focuses on fostering critical awareness among students, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers about race and racism in higher education through three interconnected strands: (1) critically analyzing the influence that the law has on race and racial justice in higher education, (2) interrogating dominant approaches to researching race and addressing racism by drawing upon interdisciplinary knowledge from critical paradigms and theories, (3) developing alternative theoretical frameworks and conceptual tools to facilitate critical educational praxis.
Dr. Iftikar has disseminated his work at national conferences and in peer-reviewed journal outlets, including a co-authored article in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education where he and Dr. Samuel D. Museus applied the AsianCrit framework to educational contexts. They were the first to develop a formal AsianCrit framework which they introduced in a previous publication.
In addition, Dr. Iftikar has published a book titled, "Racial Subjection Theory in Higher Education: Re-envisioning Racial Identities, Interests, and Inequities." The book contributes to the “third wave” of college student development theory by drawing upon insights from cultural studies, critical and postmodern theory, and Critical Race Theory. In addition to its theoretical contributions, the book aims to facilitate critical awareness about race and racism in higher education among policymakers and practitioners that can reveal alternative sites for struggling against White supremacy and to provide conceptual tools for better understanding, supporting, and re-envisioning important racial identity-based forms of activism.