BIOGRAPHY

Shani Evans' research and teaching focus on race & racism, space & place, urban education, and qualitative research methods. Her first book, We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place (University of Chicago Press, 2025) considers how Black longtime residents of a historically Black neighborhood experience and respond to gentrification and racial neighborhood change in Portland, Oregon. Her work also examines school choice and educational inequality in urban school districts.

Evans completed a Ph.D. in sociology and education at the University of Pennsylvania, an M.S.Ed. in education policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in anthropology at Amherst College. Her research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Evans, Shani Adia. 2025. We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place (University of Chicago Press).

Evans, Shani Adia. 2024. “I Wanted Diversity, But Not So Much: Middle Class White Parents, School Choice, and the Persistence of Anti-Black Stereotypes.” Urban Education 59(3).

Evans, Shani Adia. 2020. "When Schools Choose: Evaluation and Inequality in Education.” Sociological Quarterly 61(3):1-21.

Bader, Michael; Annette Lareau; Shani Adia Evans. 2019. “Talk on the Playground: The Neighborhood Context for School Choice.” City and Community 18(2):483-508.

Lareau, Annette; Shani Adia Evans; April Yee. 2016. “The Rules of the Game and the Uncertain Transmission of Advantage: Middle-class Parents’ Search for an Urban Kindergarten.” Sociology of Education 89(4):279-299.