CoCo Massengale

CoCo Massengale is a doctoral candidate at Stanford University in the Graduate School of Education’s program in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education. Her research explores the racialization of literacy and sits at the intersection of literacy studies, the history of education, and Black Studies. CoCo is a founding member of Stanford’s group on Critical Studies of Blackness in Education for which she received the James W. Lyon’s Award for Service in 2022. Her dissertation work, Literacies for Liberation: An Archival and Ethnographic Study of Black Literate Lives Across Time, is funded by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.

CoCo received her BA in Sociology from Stanford in 2009 and spent 10 years as a researcher at a not-for-profit organization before returning to pursue a doctorate. When she’s not reading, writing, or teaching, you can find her spectating women’s sports or battling campus wildlife with her beloved dog Junior.