Stanford Humanities Center
Alexandros Orphanides is a PhD candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and Anthropology of Education programs, and a PhD minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Raised primarily in Queens, New York, he holds a bachelor’s degree in history, and master’s degrees in political science and education. Prior to his time as a doctoral student, Alexandros was a public school teacher in New York City and a freelance writer.
Thinking with and through school buildings in the Bronx, New York, Orphanides' work engages with racialization through interactions with built environment, place and space, that bring contemporary and historical processes of colonization and state abandonment to bear on populations, bodies, and affective states. His research considers longstanding discourses about the geographies in which young people in the Bronx live and how these narratives operate to entrench racialization through the co-naturalization of particular bodies with particular geographies and conditions. In addition, his work considers the historically and socially cultivated ways of knowing place that his interlocutors draw on that articulate ways of perceiving structural racism and identify targets for repair and transformation.
Alexandros is also the 2024–25 Community Engagement Teaching Fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and was previously a three-year Emerging Fellow there.
