Faculty Fanfare: Ranita Ray

Sociology professor wins award for new book on classroom violence 

Ranita Ray, professor of sociology and criminology at UNM, has published a new book that recently received the 2026 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award.  

The book, Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom, explores discrimination against marginalized students that she saw in two Nevada public schools over three years while working on research that followed a group of students from 4th to 6th grade. 

Using her research, which included teacher interviews and archival materials along with three years of immersive ethnography, Ray thought she might write a book about “usual” education topics like achievement gaps, punishment gaps, funding issues, or the merits of private and charter schools vs. public schools. 

“But there I witnessed something other scholars didn’t think was worth writing about,” she said. 

“Inside schools, I witnessed the cruelty with which educators -charged with caring for children – treated them. I witnessed rampant racial and gendered harassment, harassment of disabled and queer children, and economically marginalized children,” said Ray, a feminist ethnographer who was a UNLV faculty member at the time. 

“Even though I knew I would write a book from the immersive research I was conducting, I didn’t know I would write Slow Violence. And even though, given how controversial the topic seems to be, I almost didn’t write about it — in the end I couldn’t find a way to ignore what I saw the children encounter behind closed classroom doors,” she said. 

The book explores the stories of several students who encounter an uncaring system at school as they try to overcome structural adversities, such as deportation, outside. It also delves into school abolitionism, which proposes community-led and restorative justice in schools rather than a rigid punishment-based system, as one antidote to the harassment and bullying of students she witnessed.  

“Even though this phrase often makes people uncomfortable, I outline some pathways to think about this. To touch upon a couple of the things I chart out: the book urges us to think about teachers not as a homogenous group but as a group with diverse goals and ideologies — and this can help us better design teacher training programs…Because if we assume all teachers are altruistic, antiracist, leftist people, we miss a big part of the story and do a disservice to teachers, students, and communities,” Ray said. 

Ray said there are other options for improving the system as well. 

“I also urge us to go beyond “academic achievement” as a gold standard of good schools. I show how academic achievement does not fully capture marginalized students’ relationship to schooling. A focus on the achievement gap, at the cost of other things inside schools, can do more harm than good and often shape the infrastructure for slow violence. Marginalized students at the top of their class also encountered racial and gendered harassment and cruelty to extents that then alienated them from their own education.” 

Ray said winning the 2026 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award was humbling. 

“At the same time, we also know that there are so many incredible scholars and books, and they’re all deserving. So, I like to always remember that,” she said.