Mark Warren
Biography
Mark R. Warren is a sociologist and community engaged scholar who studies and works with community, parent and youth organizing groups seeking to promote racial equity, educational justice, and community liberation. Mark is the author of six books, most recently Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Mark has co-founded several networks promoting activist scholarship, community organizing, and education justice, including the People’s Think Tank for Educational Justice and the Urban Research Based Action Network.
Area of Expertise
Community organizing, educational justice, racial equity, liberatory education
Degrees
PhD Sociology Harvard University
MA Sociology Harvard University
BA Magna Cum Laude Harvard College
Professional Publications & Contributions
Books
Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Lift Us Up! Don’t Push Us Out! Voices from the Frontlines of the Educational Justice Movement, Boston: Beacon Press. 2018.
A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. First author, with Karen L. Mapp and the community organizing research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Social Capital and Poor Communities, co-editor with Susan Saegert and J. Phillip Thompson (equal co-editors), New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2001.
Additional Information
Mark has won a number of awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and won the 2025 Grawemeyer Education Award for his book Willful Defiance.
In 2022 he won the Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship at the University of Massachusetts Boston.