Laura Azzarito

Laura Azzarito is Professor of Physical Culture and Education and Co-Director of the Visual Research Center for Education, Art, and Social Change (VRC) in the Departments of Arts & Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University.  Her scholarship advances visual research on body, culture, and identity issues with and for young people from historically marginalized groups with a focus on wellbeing at the intersection of health, spirituality, sustainability education, and social justice.  She advocates for educators’ implementation of creative, embodied, food-justice, spiritual, and eco-pedagogies in urban schools to address issues of isolation, disconnection, and body/mind separation established by the current neoliberal era of disembodiment; to advance the educational rights of students to self-understanding, self-description, and self-expression; and to strengthen the socioecological vulnerabilities of schooling, re-establishing a body-self-environment relationship, while enhancing the well-being of youth for community flourishing.