Rachel Elizabeth Fish

Rachel Fish is a sociologist of education and disability, and her research examines how inequality is produced and maintained in schools at the intersections of disability, race, and gender. She uses multiple methods, including experimental methods, observational data analyses, and interviews, to understand how disability and giftedness are co-constructed with race and gender in schools, how these processes are shaped by school context, and how they relate to educational inequality. In other research, she examines relationships among teachers, families, and administrators, and how these relations are shaped by—and shape—inequality by race, class, gender, and disability. This work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the William T Grant Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the National Science Foundation.

Fish received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.A.T. in special education from Western New Mexico University, and her A.B. in sociology from Bryn Mawr College. Prior to joining Smith College, she was an associate professor at NYU, and she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity. She taught disabled students, and also students identified as gifted, in an elementary school in rural New Mexico for five years.

At Smith, she teaches courses that bring together critical disability studies, sociology of education and stratification, and applied methods for creating inclusive, accessible schools for disabled students.