Richard Shapiro, Ph.D.
INNOVATE! Founding Co-Director
Richard Shapiro (he/him) is an educator and anthropologist with a sustained history of leadership in building innovative academic programs and alliance building. Dr. Shapiro is involved in creating emancipatory, activist, and multicultural education, focused on social justice, ecological sustainability, and cultural diversity. His teaching and program development facilitate student capacity in critical thinking, multiple perspectives, self-reflection, openness to others, connection to heritage, global awareness, alliance building across differences, ethical engagement, and strategic action. His teaching, research mentorship, and curricular design focuses on capacity building that integrates scholarship, research, and advocacy through collaboration with communities of practice. Richard has developed interactive processes, academic curricula, pedagogical methods, and communicative practices for engaging issues of cultural difference and social oppression in ways that are facilitative of individual learning, collective solidarity, and healing from social trauma. His work explores the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, caste, faith, ability, indigeneity, language, culture, and history in the constitution of subjectivity, power relations, forms of knowledge, and modes of governance.
Dr. Shapiro’s work has taken him to various sites in South Asia, Europe, South Africa, Latinx America, and North America. He is working to overcome the digital divide through shifts in the design, development, and implementation of technology to enable equity and quality education for all. He is working to document, preserve, and develop learning materials in indigenous and minority languages in Nepal. He co-founded the Jewish-Muslim Friendship Circle with Kashmiri allies in 2008 and facilitates interfaith dialogue in multiple settings.
Richard has a Ph.D. in Higher Education Leadership from Northcentral University, an M.A. in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research, and a B.A. with a double major in Politics and Modern Society and Social Thought from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Richard also studied at the Collège de France with Michel Foucault in 1981 and 1983-1984.
Richard is grateful that his grandparents escaped pogroms in the Ukraine and Poland, settling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and that his parents migrated to Los Angeles post World War II. He also feels blessed to share his life with Angana Chatterji, a scholar/advocate from Kolkata, India. Richard celebrates humor as a practice that shifts the boundaries of the possible by saying the unsayable in ways that provoke catharsis and reflection.