Christina Novakov-Ritchey is a culture and education worker whose passion and expertise lies at the intersection of community engagement, prison abolition, higher education, and the arts.

Christina holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles and serves as the Associate Director of College-in-Prison Programs for NYU’s Prison Education Program. As an educator in carceral spaces, she seeks to actualize Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of abolition, which aims to “reduce the distance between the inside and the outside until there is no ‘inside.’” She previously served as Assistant Professor of Humanities with the University of Houston-Clear Lake’s prison education program, Transforming Lives by Degrees, where she developed courses at the MA and BA levels on anticolonial history and theory, Marxism, political economy, and the politics of knowledge production. In this role she also created a faculty development group for professors teaching in prison, developed modules for teaching student research skills in prison, built partnerships with campus units and community organizations, produced public events, conducted program evaluations, led research projects, and participated in the founding of Texas' first statewide consortium of higher education in prison providers.

As a researcher, Christina’s work examines issues of epistemic violence, asking why the knowledge of certain communities—such as peasants, incarcerated people, Indigenous people, colonized people, racialized people, people from peripheral geographies, and others—is so often not respected, safeguarded, or even acknowledged by institutions. Resisting the blatantly classist, racist, and sexist hierarchy of knowledge, Christina’s work seeks to expand the practice of education far beyond the confines of schools and universities. She is interested in how the idea of “study” can be used to develop new practices of learning in public space in ways that center the innate ability of all people to produce and transmit knowledge.  

Her work has been published by Routledge, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Slavic and East European Journal, Women* Write the Balkans, and others.