Beth Sondel's research partners critical theory and ethnographic case study methods to explore the ways in which sociopolitical contexts shape teachers’ understanding of and attempts to enact social justice education.Her research trajectory began with an examination of the ways in which teachers who work within the context of neoliberal reform and privatization come to understand and attempt to engage in social justice. To that end, her dissertation study was a multi-site ethnographic study of TFA teachers working in “no excuses” charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. She found that teachers were being trained and supported to equate their students’ level of compliance and assessment data not only with their students’ potential for social mobility, but with their own self-worth. This resulted in ,-centric pedagogy, direct instruction, a lack of culturally relevant practices, and systems of rewards and punishment that denied students of their basic humanity.More recently, she has expanded my research focus towards understanding how teachers develop and enact anti-oppressive theories of social justice in our current, bifurcated political climate. In the first project of this kind, Dr. Sondel led a collaborative project to collect stories from 1,000 teachers on their pedagogical responses to the 2016 presidential election outcomes. She is in the process of developing a follow up study, using portraiture, to document the nuanced ways in which teachers who teach current events through a decidedly anti-neutral, justice-oriented inform their pedagogical choices.