PSA 2025 Featured Speakers

Pedro Antonio Noguera, Ph. D.

PSA 2025 Presidential Pleanary Speaker

             Pedro Noguera is one of the nation’s leading scholars on issues related to race, inequality, and education.  Prior to starting at USC to serve as the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the Rossier School of Education, he served as a Professor of Education and holder of endowed chairs at UCLA, NYU, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of 15 books. His most recent book, A Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the Tough Questions and Complex Issues Confronting K-12 Education in the United States Today with Rick Hess, was the winner of the American Association of Publishers Prose Award in 2021). From 2009–2012, Noguera served as a trustee for the State University of New York and as an appointee of the governor. He has served as an advisor to the governor of New Mexico on education policy and worked as an advisor to the state departments of education in Washington, Oregon, New York, and Rhode Island, as well as several large urban school districts throughout the country.  In 2022, he was appointed to President Biden’s National Commission on Hispanics, and he was asked to serve as the co-chair of the state of California’s Black Student Achievement Taskforce by the state superintendent. In 2014, he was elected to the National Academy of Education and Phi Delta Kappa honor society, and in 2020, Noguera was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Noguera has received seven honorary doctorates from American universities and received awards from the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at NYU for his research and advocacy efforts aimed at fighting poverty.  In 2023, he was ranked 1st in the nation for influence and impact in education by Education Week.  

Victor Rios Ph. D. 

PSA 2025 STAR Speaker Series - Sponsored by the Emeritus and Retired Sociologists Committee

Victor Rios' work analyzes the role of social control and education in determining the well-being of young people living in urban marginality; tracks the social consequences of the punitive state and punitive social control-across institutional settings; and examines young people’s resilience and responses to social marginalization. He uses insight from his research to promote equitable policies and develop programs to improve the lives of marginalized youths. Rios’s book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (NYU Press, 2011), analyzes how juvenile crime policies and criminalization affect the everyday lives of urban youth. Punished is Winner of, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, American Sociological Association, Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities; Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book Award, American Sociological Association, Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility; C. Wright Mills Book Award Finalist, Society for the Study of Social Problems; Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association, Section on Latina/o Sociology and Honorable Mention for the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Book Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems.

In his latest book Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth (University of Chicago Press, 2017) Rios finds the traditional good kid/bad kid, street kid/decent kid dichotomy is much too simplistic, arguing instead that authorities and institutions help create these identities—and that they can play an instrumental role in providing young people with the resources for shifting between roles. He finds that to be a poor Latino youth is to be a human target—victimized and considered an enemy by others, viewed as a threat to law enforcement and schools, and burdened by stigma, disrepute, and punishment. Human Targets was a selection for the LA Times Festival of Books in 2017. Rios has also published on juvenile justice, masculinity, and race and crime in scholarly journals such as The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences, The Annual Review of Sociology, Latino Studies, and Critical Criminology. He is also the author of three trade books aimed at public audiences.

Professor Rios was awarded the 2017 Public Understanding of Sociology Award by the American Sociological Association. The award is given to a "person or persons who have made exemplary contributions to advance the public understanding of sociology, sociological research, and scholarship among the general public." He is currently Chair of the Latina/o Sociology Section, American Sociological Association. Rios engages in multiple public sociology projects. One of his recent projects is an intervention with high school students that have been pushed-out. A documentary film, funded by Sundance, The Ford Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, YouthBuild and other foundations, featuring his work is scheduled to premiere in Fall 2018 (thepushouts.com). His Ted Talk “Help for the Kids the Education System Ignores” has garnered over 1.3 million views across platforms.