Dr. Jackie Pedota is a 2025-2026 Mellon/SAR Academic Freedom Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently serves as Co-PI, alongside Dr. Liliana Garces and Dr. Eliza Epstein, on a Sloan and Trellis Foundation-funded research project that examines the implementation of the anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion law in Texas and its consequences for racially conscious policy and practice.
Dr. Pedota earned her Ph.D. and M.Ed. from the University of Texas at Austin and has a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida. Before pursuing an academic career, she worked for over a decade across the P-20 educational pipeline including roles in K-12 instruction, non-profit management, educational technology, and higher education administration.
Dr. Pedota's research broadly examines educational access and opportunity within racialized organizations and restrictive political environments. Drawing on organizational theory, socio-legal analysis, and historical inquiry, her work illuminates the mechanisms that reinforce and reproduce inequities for historically marginalized communities in higher education.
Dr. Pedotas scholarship has received national recognition, including the prestigious Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Her research has been featured at national conferences such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Oral History Association (OHA), the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). Dr. Pedota's work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including The Journal of Higher Education, Educational Researcher, and Education Sciences, and in news outlets like Inside Higher Ed.
Racial Equity, Higher Education, Political and Legal Contexts, Diversity Initiatives, Organizational Change, Social Movements, Student Activism, University Counterspaces, Campus Cultural/Identity Centers, Oral History, Participatory Action Research, Public Scholarship
Liliana M Garces (Supervisor)Expertise on the intersection of law and educational policies and practices focused on access and equity in higher education, including affirmative action, freedom of expression and inclusion, and the use and influence of research in law.
Division F Junior Graduate Student Representative, AERA(2023 - Present)
New Professional Graduate Student Review Board Member, The Journal of Students Affairs Research and Practice(2022 - Present)
Managing Editor, U.S. Latina & Latino Oral History Journal(2021 - Present)
Professional Development Co-Chair, Educational Leadership & Policy Student Association (ELPSA)(2020 - 2021)
Member, Student Advisory Council, UT College of Education(2020 - 2021)
Campus Liaison, Division L Graduate Student Leadership Committee, American Educational Research Association(2020 - Present)
Member, Professional Development Committee, Association for the Study of Higher Education(2020 - Present)
Professional Development Director, Latinx/a/o Graduate Student Association(2020 - Present)
Proposal submissions coordinator, Latina Empowerment Symposium Committee, University of Florida(2019 - 2020)
Pedota, J.. (2023). Institutionalization of a Latinx Campus Cultural Center: Exploring a Case of Racialized Administrative Burdens Faced by Latinx Staff and Students.
Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership.
https://doi.org/10.1177/15554589231197130. doi:10.1177/15554589231197130.
Flores, R.. & Pedota, J.. (2023). COVID-19 Impacts on Mexican American College Student Experiences in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.
Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity (JCSCORE),
9(1), 65–90.
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2642-2387.2023.9.1.64-90. doi:10.15763/issn.2642-2387.2023.9.1.64-90.
Garces, L., Ambriz, E. & Pedota, J. (2022). Legal Challenges to Bias Response Teams on College Campuses.
Educational Researcher,
51(6), 431–435.
https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221088307. doi:10.3102/0013189X221088307.
Pedota, J. (2022). We Need to Be Human: Using Oral Histories of Latino/a Staff and Faculty to Examine Neoliberalism in the Age of COVID-19.
US Latina & Latino Oral History Journal,
6, 26–49.
https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/872504.
This project is funded by the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.
This descriptive case study examines how faculty engaged in racial equityfocused public scholarship navigate escalating state and federal threats to academic freedom and considerations of race in U.S. higher education. Across the country, universities face intensified scrutiny over how faculty, staff, and students engage topics of race, racism, and systemic inequity. State legislation, executive orders, and political pressures have sought to restrict classroom discussions, eliminate diversity-focused initiatives, and sanction faculty for public commentary on racial injustice. These pressures are even greater for public scholarshiplike op-eds, community forums, art-based projects, media interviews, and social media engagementwhich has long fallen into a gray area of academic freedom protections. Yet such scholarship plays a vital role in connecting academic knowledge to communities, shaping public discourse, and advancing racial equity. This study focuses on faculty working in some of the most politically restrictive environments, such as Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, and North Carolina, to examine how these scholars experience, navigate, and resist these constraints, offering critical insights into the limits of academic freedom in the U.S. Building on my prior research that positions racial equity as central to the contemporary defense of academic freedom, this project advances an expansive, equity-centered vision of academic freedom and offers strategies to better protect scholars at risk.
Reading Group in the Humanities - UF Center for Humanities & the Public Sphere
2021-2022 UT College of Education Graduate Student Research Award
Mellon/SAR Academic Freedom Fellowship, Scholars at Risk (2025 - 2026)
Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award, The Association for the Study of Higher Education (2024 - 2024)
Postsecondary Education Dissertatino of the Year Award Semifinalist, Postsecondary Education Division (Division J), American Educational Research Association (2024 - 2024)
Bill Lasher Doctoral Student Excellence Award, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, The University of Texas at Austin (2024 - 2024)
Doctoral Student Award, Educational Change SIG, The American Educational Research Association (2024 - 2024)
Best Scholarly Paper, The American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (2023 - 2023)
National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellowship, University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement (2022 - 2023)
League of Innovation in Colleges Fellowship, The University of Texas at Austin - College of Education (2021 - 2021)
Jesse H. Jones Endowed Fellowship, The University of Texas at Austin - College of Education (2020 - 2023)
Neoliberalism in the Academy: Exploring Latinx Oral Histories from an Ongoing Archival Project, American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Diego, CA (2022)
Using Consejitos to Navigate Doctoral Socialization: A Composite Counternarrative of Latinx/a* Doctoral Colegas, American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Diego, CA (2022)
Surgir, No Sufrir: Identifying the Impact of Emerging HSIs on Latinx Student Experiences, National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), Virtual (2021)
Emerging HSIs: What happens when Elite Public Universities become HSIs?, National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) 2021 Annual Conference, (forthcoming) Virtual (2021)
Deconstructing Border Narratives: COVID-19 Impacts on Latinx Student Experiences in the Rio Grande Valley, Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), San Juan, Puerto Rico (2021)
Engaging Faculty across Campus to become Champions for Career Readiness, National Association of Student Personnel Administrators Region III Summer Symposium (conference cancelled), Orlando, FL (2020)
Latinx Culture Centers: A History of Exclusion as told through Oral Histories of La Casita, Critical Race Studies in Education Association Annual Conference (conference cancelled), Newark, DE (2020)
Moving from Collecting to Interpreting and Analyzing COVID-19 Oral Histories, Journal of the Plague Year (JOTPY), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND7ulg42tNk (2020)
Latinx Culture Centers: A History of Exclusion as told through Oral Histories of La Casita, The University of Texas at Austin Sequels Symposium, Austin, TX (2019)
Latinx Culture Centers: A History of Exclusion as told through Oral Histories of La Casita, American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, ON, CA (2019)
Developing a Diverse Educator Pipeline: Starting the Journey to Social Justice in the Classroom, University of Florida All YAll Social Justice Collective Conference, Gainesville, FL (2019)
Engaging Pre-health Students with Employers: Facilitating Career Exploration through Skills Labs, Southern Association of Colleges and Employers Annual Conference, Memphis, TN (2019)
A Brief History of La Casita: Space as Sanctuary for Latinx Students, Race, Ethnicity, and Place IXth Conference, Austin, TX (2018)
TRiO Student Support Services: Institutional Context, Benchmarking, and Student Outcomes, Texas Higher Education Symposium, Austin, TX (2017)
TRiO Student Support Services: Institutional Context and Student Retention, Texas Association of Student Special Services Programs Conference, Tyler, TX (2017)
Planning and programming with the Non-traditional student in mind, The University of Texas at Austin Professional Development Day, Austin, TX (2017)
