About

Richard Shapiro is currently 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 pursues this work as VP of Education and Public Policy at a Bay Area educational technology start-up, through consulting, workshops, curriculum development, and teaching. Shapiro has been involved in creating emancipatory, activist and multicultural education, focused on social justice, ecological sustainability, and cultural diversity. His work understands the importance of public/private partnerships, community empowerment, and youth leadership for the cultivation of ethical citizenship, critical reflection, alliances across differences, and experiments in freedom. Shapiro’s teaching and curricular design has focused on capacity building that integrates scholarship, research, and advocacy through collaboration with communities of practice

Shapiro has a Ph.D. in Higher Education Leadership from Northcentral University (2017), an M.A. in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research (1981), and a B.A. with a double major in Politics and Modern Society and Social Thought from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1977). Shapiro also studied at the Collège de France with Michel Foucault in 1981, and 1983-1984. Shapiro is multilingual with fluency in English, near-fluency in French, and speaking and reading capacity in Spanish.

How can higher education intervene on dynamics of oppression and resistance organized through complex systems that involve intersections of race, class, gender, faith, culture, and sexuality in local and global contexts? Shapiro’s intellectual work is focused on the relations between faith traditions, subject formation, and political culture in the United States, and the need for shifts in technology to enable environmental justice, social and economic equality, multicultural polity, and indigenous cultural survival in local and global contexts. He is researching Anglo-European histories of othering of Muslims and Jews as relevant to an analysis of contemporary forms of racism.

Shapiro has conducted and mentored research on technology and educational quality and equity. He has developed culturally relevant learning materials in alliance with communities and facilitated pre-K-16 teacher education. He has participated in forums to shift conversations in the technology sector to seriously address key issues. These issues include: surveillance, rights to privacy and the right to be forgotten, income inequality, the lack of diversity in industry workplaces, monopoly over vital services, electronic waste, urban gentrification and affordable housing, the digital divide, the erosion of democracy, the circulation of misinformation, the impoverishment of the public sphere, and  bias in machine learning.

Shapiro’s passion and commitment to emancipatory education has deeply influenced his perspectives on teaching, and his service to academic institutions and larger communities. Shapiro worked as Guest Faculty as Adjunct Professor in the School of Education Doctoral Program, University of San Francisco from August 2013 to May 2014. Prior to that, Shapiro served on the faculty in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco from 1986-2011, as Adjunct and Assistant Professor (1986-1996), and Director and Assistant Professor (1997-2004), and Chair and Associate Professor (2004-2011). Shapiro guided and envisioned the shaping and rethinking of the Anthropology M.A. and Ph.D. Programs at CIIS since 1999, to create a curriculum in postcolonial anthropology that combined critical inquiry with activist anthropology for social change. He brings with him considerable experience in higher education development and reform, having been Director of Humanities, New College of California, from 1985-95, and through his work as a founding member of Todos: The Sherover-Simms Institute for Alliance Building, a Bay Area organization that works with youth, social service organizations and universities, on issues of social oppression and cultural identity. Shapiro’s contributions to teaching, research, and program development combine innovative pedagogy with rigorous academic standards.

Shapiro has been working with education for social change in developing frameworks for critical self-reflection, hospitality to difference, and political activism. He has developed processes, academic curricula, and pedagogical methods for engaging issues of cultural difference and social oppression in ways that are facilitative of individual learning and collective solidarity. Shapiro has done this work through courses, program development, workshops, and consulting. He has mentored graduate and undergraduate students in leadership for social change, and worked with high school youth, interfaith organizations, nonprofits, universities, social service agencies, private-sector companies, and community groups since 1985. He has been doing this work in organized settings since 1972, with “Brotherhood/Sisterhood” youth programs sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

Shapiro’s dissertation focused on technology, human rights, and multilingual education for whole systems educational change in Nepal. He is working on a book drawing on this work, Multilingual Education, Human Rights, Indigenous Cultural Survival, and Sustainable Development in Contemporary Nepal (Forthcoming 2022). He is also working on a book manuscript, Michel Foucault: Truth, Power, Subjectivity, and Governmentality (draft title). Shapiro’s intellectual focus includes the dynamics of othering linked to race, class, gender, indigeneity, faith, sexuality, and other differences, technology and society, the history of social thought, political and cultural resistance, and anthropology as cultural critique. His work is influenced by his association and study with Michel Foucault in New York in 1981, and, in Paris in 1981, and 1983-1984, Susan Sontag in New York in 1983, and with Herbert Marcuse in Santa Cruz in 1974-75. Shapiro has created and taught core courses that have been intellectually innovative, such as “Critical History of the Human Sciences,” “Self and Society: Building Alliances Across Differences,” “A History of Human Rights: Philosophical, Cultural, and Political Dimensions (Two Semesters),” “Issues in Education: Global Perspectives,” “Reading and Writing Culture,” “Nietzsche/Foucault: An Archaeology of Western Culture,” “Cultural Notions of Self and Sexuality,” “Secular/Post-secular? Emancipatory Jewish Thought,” “Technology and Society: Contemporary Issues,” and “Critical Discourses on Religion.”

Shapiro has facilitated various training workshops, seminars, and group processes, and served on committees related to diversity and alliance building, ecology and sustainability, indigenous cultural survival, and interfaith dialogue. He has been working with documenting, preserving, and developing learning materials in indigenous and minority languages (IML) in Nepal, as well as working to strengthen democracy, human rights, and multicultural polity there. Shapiro has been active in interfaith alliance in Kashmir, co-founding the Jewish-Muslim Friendship Circle with Kashmiri allies in 2008. He has facilitated reflection on issues of socially produced trauma with rural and urban youth, and on issues of alliance building, youth empowerment, and interfaith dialogue in various sites in India.

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