Kathryn A. Kozaitis
Associate Professor and Chair
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1993
Research Interests: Social Transformations, Cultural Politics, Intervention Theory and Methods, Community Organization, and Educational Reform ( Greece, North America, Roma Diaspora)
Kathryn A. Kozaitis investigates global-local articulations, particularly the processes by which economically, politically, and socially subordinated groups use culture to construct security, community, identity, and meaning. She has conducted field work on race, ethnicity, and identity construction among the Roma (Gypsies) in Athens, Greece (1987-1989), and on ethnicity, class, gender, and age among Greek immigrants in Chicago, IL (1983-1985). Her work as an urban applied anthropologist focuses on employment, health, and educational disparities among racialized populations in the United States, and identity politics among gays and lesbians in North America (since 1977).
In the last decades, she has been engaged in NSF funded initiatives to improve science and math education among teachers in Atlanta's low-income school district. As the ethnographer in the Elementary Science Education Partners (ESEP) project during 1996-2003 she designed and implemented Participatory Reform, a research and development model that examines institutional policies, organizational practices, and professional partnerships through culture, equity, and agency as the reference points for analysis and sustainable planned change. Presently she is a researcher in Partnerships for Reform in Science and Mathematics (PRISM); she studies the process by which PRISM constructs a Participatory Reward Structure that is changing policy and cultural practices of higher education by engaging scientists and mathematicians of the University System of Georgia to improve the literacy of science and math among teachers and students in grades K-16 (primary, secondary, and post-secondary education) in the state of Georgia.
Dr. Kozaitis' research and teaching repertoire includes anthropological theory and praxis, social movements, qualitative research design, educational reform, and urban anthropology. She is the co-author (with Conrad Phillip Kottak of the University of Michigan) of On Being Different: Diversity and Multiculturalism in the North American Mainstream, McGraw Hill, 2008 (3rd edition). Dr. Kozaitis is consultant to human service organizations on health, education, and welfare that serve underrepresented populations.
