ABOUT THE UCLA PAULO FREIRE INSTITUTE
The Paulo Freire Institute seeks to gather scholars and critics of Freire’s work in permanent dialogue to foster the advancement of new theories and concrete interventions in the real world.
Director, Carlos Alberto Torres, Ph.D.
Dr. Torres is a Distinguished Professor, and former Director of the UCLA-Latin American Center, is a political sociologist of education who did his undergraduate work in sociology in Buenos Aires, Argentina (B.A. honors and teaching credential in Sociology, Universidad del Salvador), his graduate work in Mexico (M.A. in Political Science, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSO) and the United States (M.A. and Ph.D. in International Development Education, Stanford University), and post-doctoral studies in educational foundations in Edmonton, Canada (University of Alberta). Please see below for his blog:
https://www.pfigce.org/
Program Officer, Michaela L. Ensweiler, Ph.D. Candidate
Michaela is a Ph.D. candidate in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education division at UCLA. She has research interests in eco-pedagogy and food systems. Prior to UCLA she worked as a Lead Workload Supervisor at IBM, a public school elementary teacher, and taught abroad in Taiwan and China. She holds a master’s of science degree in education from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s in English Literature and Creative Writing from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.
Associate Director, Greg William Misiaszek, Ph.D.
Greg has been a member of UCLA PFI since 2006, a few months before starting his Ph.D. in Education at UCLA with an international education focus. He was the UCLA-PFI Program Officer from 2007-2009, named an honorary founded in 2009, and made Associate Director from 2011-2018 and is now Associate Director. He has been an assistant professor at Beijing Normal University since 2013. His work focuses on Freirean environmental pedagogies (e.g., ecopedagogy), critical theories of globalization, decoloniality, citizenship, (eco)racism, (eco)feminism, gender, Indigenous and Southern epistemologies, (eco)linguistics, and media culture.