Christina Novakov-Ritchey is a culture worker whose passion and expertise lies at the intersection of community engagement, education, and the arts.
Her work asks why the
knowledge of certain communities—such as peasants, incarcerated people, Indigenous people, colonized people, racialized people, people from peripheral geographies, people with disabilities,
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.
Christina has worked extensively in the field of prison education. She previously served as Assistant Professor of Humanities for the Transforming Lives by Degrees Program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where she developed courses at the
MA and BA levels on
anticolonial history and theory, Marxism, political economy, and the politics of knowledge production. She has also taught for UCLA’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.’”
