TC Affiliations:
Educational Background
Doctor of Philosophy in Psychometrics, Fordham University, 2007
Master of Arts in Psychology, Fordham University, 2004
Master of Arts in the Social Sciences, The University of Chicago, 2002
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Spanish, North Carolina Central University, 2000
Scholarly Interests
Ezekiel Dixon-Román is Professor of Critical Race, Media, & Educational Studies and Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (formerly the Institute for Urban and Minority Education). He is also co-founder of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies and the Critical Computation Bureau. He joined the Teachers College faculty on January 1 2023 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice.
His research program makes critical interventions towards re-theorizing the technologies and practices of quantification that he understands as mediums and agencies of sociopolitical systems, whereby race and other assemblages of difference are byproducts. He is particularly interested in how power generates difference, especially in bodily capacities to change and be changed. His research question addresses how sociotechnical systems of quantification work on, with, and in the body to produce racialized demarcations, which decide which bodily capacities to regenerate and which to debilitate. Dixon-Román argues that, in the ‘computational turn’ of global neoliberal racial capitalism, the biopolitics of statistical demarcations of bodies forms and shapes the movement and flow of power and sociopolitical relations. As such, his research is invested in speculative questions of futurity that rethink technologies of quantification toward onto-epistemologies other-wise. He engages with philosophical and methodological interventions toward developing alternative modes of inquiry and practices of quantification that might enable critical space for reconstituting sociopolitical relations and the movement and flow of social life.
Dr. Dixon-Román is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education (2017, University of Minnesota Press). In this book project, he reconceptualizes quantification and theories of social reproduction in education from a cultural theoretical lens that posits culture is nature and the human is one of myriad expressions of Earth’s becoming. Inheriting Possibility received the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association.
He also co-edited Thinking Comprehensively About Education: Spaces of Educative Possibility and Their Implications for Public Policy (2012, Routledge) and more recently Black Radical Love: A New Black Reconstruction through the Thought & Activism of Edmund W. Gordon (2023, Third World Press). In addition, he co-guest edited “Alternative Ontologies of Number: Rethinking the Quantitative in Computational Culture” (2016, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies), “The computational turn in education research: Critical and creative perspectives on the digital data deluge” (2017, Research in Education), “Control Societies @30: Technopolitical Forces and Ontologies of Difference” (2020, Social Text Online), and “Dialogues on Recursive Colonialism, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-Social” (2021, eflux journal). He has a forthcoming co-edited collection, Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions: A Compilation of Critical Memoranda (with University of Minnesota Press) and is currently working on three book projects: (1) a co-edited collection , Colonial Fractals: The Politics of Planetary Computation, (2) a co-authored book, Recursive Colonialism, and (3) an authored book project, Spectral Coloniality: Machine Intelligence and the Political, that examines the haunting formations of the transparent subject in algorithmic governance and the potential for transformative technopolitical systems open to ontoepistemologies other-wise.
He is a co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, “Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise”, a member of the Social Text Editorial Collective and the Communication, Culture & Critique Editorial Collective, and associate editor of the 2023 and 2025 volumes of the Review of Research in Education, one of the flagship journals for the American Educational Research Association.
Selected Publications
Books
Curinga, M., de Freitas, E., Dixon-Román, E., & Webb, P. T. (Eds.) (Spring 2026). Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions: A Compilation of Critical Memoranda. University of Minnesota Press.
Dixon-Román, E., Lee, C.D., Madhubuti, H.R., Rice, D.W. (Eds.) 2023. Black Radical Love: A New Black Reconstruction through the Thought & Activism of Edmund W. Gordon. Chicago IL: Third World Press.
Dixon-Román, E. 2017. Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction and Quantification in Education. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Dixon-Román, E. & Gordon, E. W. (Eds.) 2012. Thinking Comprehensively About Education: Spaces of Educative Possibility and Their Implications for Public Policy. New York NY: Routledge.
Select Journal Articles
Dixon-Román, E., & Parisi, L. (In Press). Cosmocomputation & Negpoethics. Social Text 43(3): 81-109.
Dixon-Román, E. (In Press). Process, the Political, & Knowing How to Act. Comparative Education Review.
Dixon-Román, E. (2025). Blackness & Measurement. Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 61(4): 403-416.
Dixon-Román, E., & Parisi, L., Parvan, O., & Terranova, T. 2025. Recursive Apocalypse. Communication, Culture & Critique.
Dixon-Román, E. 2024. “AI & Psychometrics: Epistemology, Process, & Politics.” Journal of Educational & Behavioral Statistics 49(5): 709-714.
Nichols, T. P., Thrall, A., Quiros, J, & Dixon-Román, E. (2024). "Speculative Capture: Literacy after Platformization." Reading Research Quarterly 59(2): 211-218.
Nichols, T. P., & Dixon-Román, E. (2024). “Platform governance and education policy: Power and politics in emerging edtech ecologies.” Educational Evaluation & Policy Analysis 46(2): 309-328.
Dixon-Román, E. with Arlene Fernandez, Julian Quiros, & Nicole Sansone. 2022. Diffracting Boundaries: Toward Post-Philosophies of Quantification and the Black Radical Tradition. Qualitative Inquiry (For a Special Issue on “Post-Philosophies”).
Dixon-Román, E. with Ramon Amaro. 2021. “Haunting, Blackness, & Algorithmic Thought.” e-flux journal 123: 1-11. (special issue on “Dialogues on Recursive Colonialism, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-Social.”) https://www.e-flux.com/journal/123/437244/haunting-blackness-and-algorithmic-thought/
Dixon-Román, E. with Jasbir Puar. 2021. “Mass Debilitation & Algorithmic Governance.” e-flux journal 123: 1-11. (special issue on “Dialogues on Recursive Colonialism, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-Social.”) https://www.e-flux.com/journal/123/436945/mass-debilitation-and-algorithmic-governance/
Jocson, K. & Dixon-Román, E. 2021. Becoming Shuri: CTE, Racializing Affect, and the Becoming-Technologist. Reading Research Quarterly 56(2): 257-271.
Parisi, L. & Dixon-Román, E. 2020. Recursive Colonialism & Cosmo-Computation. Social Text Online.
Dixon-Román, E. 2020. A Haunting Logic of Psychometrics: Toward the Speculative and Indeterminacy of Blackness in Measurement. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 39(3): 94-96.
Dixon-Román, E., Phil Nichols, & Ama Nyame-Mensah. 2020. The Racializing Forces of/in AI Educational Technologies. Learning, Media & Technology 45(3): 236-250. (Special Issue on “AI and Education: critical perspectives and alternative futures”)
Dixon-Román, E., Nyame-Mensah, Ama, and Russell, Allison. 2019. Algorithmic Legal Reasoning as Racializing Assemblages. Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies 7: 1-41. http://computationalculture.net/algorithmic-legal-reasoning-as-racializing-assemblages/.
Leonardo, Z., and Dixon-Román, E. 2018. Post-Colorblindness; Or, Racialized Speech after Symbolic Racism. Educational Philosophy and Theory 50(14): 1386.
Dixon-Román, E. 2017. Regenerative Capacities: New Materialisms, Inheritance, and Biopolitical Technologies in Education Policy. Equity & Excellence in Education 50(4): 434-445.
Dixon-Román, E. 2017. Toward A Hauntology on Data: On The Sociopolitical Forces of Data Assemblages. Research in Education 98(1): 44-58.
de Freitas, E., and Dixon-Román, E. 2017. The computational turn in education research: Critical and creative perspectives on the digital data deluge. Research in Education 98(1): 3-13.
Dixon-Román, E. 2016. Diffractive Possibilities: Cultural Studies and Quantification. Transforming Anthropology 24(2):157-167.
de Freitas, E., Dixon-Román, E., and Lather, P. (listed alphabetically) 2016. Alternative Ontologies of Number: Rethinking the Quantitative in Computational Culture. Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies 16(5): 431-434.
Dixon-Román, E. 2016. Algo-Ritmo: More-Than-Human Performative Acts and the Racializing Assemblages of Algorithmic Architectures. Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies 16(5):482-490.
Select Book Chapters
Dixon-Román, E. Spring 2026. “Instrumentalizing Colonial Reason.” in Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions: A Compilation of Critical Memoranda. Matthew Curinga, Elizabeth de Freitas, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, & P. Taylor Webb (Eds.). University of Minnesota Press.
Dixon-Román, E. 2023. “Algorithmic Governance & Racializing Affect.” in Affect Theory Reader 2: Worlding, Tensions, Futures. Gregory Seigworth & Carolyn Pedwell (eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dixon-Román, E. 2023. “Exteriority, Black Noise & the Computational Accident.” In J. Brouwer & S. V. Tuinen (Eds.), technological accidents, accidental technologies. Rotterdam NL: V2_PUBLISHING.
Madaio, Michael, Mayfield, Elijah, Blodgett, Su Lin, & Dixon-Román, Ezekiel. 2023. “ Beyond “Fairness:” Structural (In)Justice Lenses on AI for Education" In Wayne Holmes and Kaśka Porayska-Pomsta (Eds.), The Ethics of AI in Education: Data, algorithms, equity and biases, in educational contexts.
Parisi, L., & Dixon-Román, E. 2020. Data capitalism, sociogenic prediction and recursive indeterminacies. In P. Mörtenböck and H. Mooshammer (Eds.), Data Publics: Public Plurality in an Era of Data Determinacy. (pp. 48-62). New York, NY: Routledge.
Dixon-Román, E., Jackson, John L., & McKinney de Royston, M. 2020. Deconstructing the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide: Toward A New Empiricism. In Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning. Na’ilah Nasir, Carol D. Lee, Roy Pea, and Maxine McKinney de Royston (Eds.). New York, NY: Routledge.