Cawthon Appointed Affiliate of Texas Center for Equity Promotion
Dr. Stephanie Cawthon has been appointed an affiliate of the Texas Center for Equity Promotion (TexCEP), an interdisciplinary research center at The University of Texas at Austin that is committed to addressing and eliminating disparities in education and health among underserved populations.
She joins nine other distinguished faculty members from throughout UT Austin in the inaugural affiliate cohort of TexCEP, which was founded in 2020 at the College of Education by Dean Charles R. Martinez.
“It is an honor to join this community of equity-centered researchers and practitioners,” said Dr. Cawthon. “I am excited to get started with innovative projects that can make a difference in disability equity.”
According to the affiliate announcement, researchers and practitioners at TexCEP use interdisciplinary approaches to understand, and intervene with, roots of inequities that surround children and families. They support and conduct high-quality applied research, disseminate evidence-based information, and train future professionals regarding the nature, origins, contexts, effects, and elimination of inequalities in education and health.
Affiliates and steering committee members of TexCEP are also committed to:
Deliberate anti-racist and equity-focused approaches in both their research and practice.
Explicit and ongoing examination of their own positionality and privilege within the context of each project.
Careful consideration of the power dynamics inherent in every stage of the research process, from an examination of the actors participating in study design and motivations for establishing research questions, all the way through dissemination of findings, with a particular interest in projects that yield valuable and actionable practices, policies, and/or recommendations.
Mindful focus to locate, implicate, and disrupt existing power structures and contextual factors that perpetuate inequity, rather than pathologize or further marginalize the communities they intend to serve.
TexCEP affiliates and members prioritize working with populations and communities that have been historically marginalized, and they value research that maintains a strengths-based, community-derived, and focused work that draws on the historical resilience of many social identities/dimensions.