LaShawn Faith Washington

Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin. She joined the UT faculty in August 2025, and prior to her appointment, Dr. Washington was an assistant professor of qualitative research at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of Educational Psychology-Science of Psychology, Data, and Research in Education program. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis with an emphasis in Higher Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Dallas, Texas native, Dr. Washington is a proud first-generation non-traditional student, community college graduate, and a two-time alumna of UT Austin receiving an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction-Cultural Studies in Education, and a bachelor's degree in Government with honors.

Her overarching research explores the historical and contemporary inequities in higher education and how issues of race and gender intersect in ways that impact the experiences of Black women in academia. Her most current ethnographic research project, entitled, "Let Love Lead," utilized Black feminist theorizing through a bell hooks approach to examine relationships, intersectional identities, and notions of love between Black women collegians and Black women student affairs professionals at a predominantly white institution. Dr. Washington was recently awarded $22,000 by the OU Institute for Community and Society Transformation to extend her current research investigating the identities of Black college women through visual elicitation methods and focus groups. Additionally, she was selected as a semi-finalist for dissertation of the year by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division J. She has presented research at the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), American Educational Research Association, The National Association for Student Affairs Professionals (NASPA), and The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE). Her most recent scholarship was published in The Journal of Higher Education, The International Journal of Qualitative Research, and Teachers College Record.