Alexander Feliciano Mejía

Alex (he/him) is an educator, artist, and researcher focusing on the experiences of communities impacted by racial capitalism. His interdisciplinary work focuses on the everyday forms of creativity, ingenuity, and solidarity that racialized working class communities engage in. Alex works with audiovisual material including video, film, sound, and installation, and connects these practices with various forms of language arts such as poetry and essay. His research methodology is informed by ethnographic and qualitative approaches to the study of language and cultural practice, and he extends these traditions through the incorporation of creative inquiry that draws on his interdisciplinary arts practice. 

At SF State’s Graduate College of Education, Alex’s teaching focuses on two areas: arts-based approaches to critical literacy, and ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to linguistic practice. Both of these areas of teaching focus on supporting middle school and high school teachers to draw on their own sources of creative practices as a foundation for their pedagogical and curricular designs. Further, his teaching also encourages people becoming teachers to recognize and build on the linguistic and multilingual creativity that is often rendered invisible in school-based settings. He works toward supporting educators in developing pedagogical and curricular designs that can combat racialized and class-based ideologies in educational contexts. 

In addition to working at SF State, Alex also studies here–working toward an MFA in Creative Writing. His writing often incorporates moving and still images, and he’s currently working on two collections of work: (1) a project focused on the colonial development of language and literacy ideologies, along with their connections to contemporary debates on reading and racism, and (2) an ongoing project on the Armenian and Guatemalan diasporas that he’s approach through work with his family’s archives of text, film, video, and photos. Alex has received support in his artistic practice from the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) at Stanford, Southern Exposure, Root Division, and Kearny Street Workshop among others.