Stanford research fellowship centers community voices for research on school to prison pipeline

When Subini Annamma was a special education teacher at high schools in California and Colorado, she noticed that certain students would disappear from class for days at a time, only to find out later that they’d been sent to juvenile detention centers.

This led her to go on to teach at some of these youth carceral facilities, where, upon meeting students inside, she saw a strong link between disability, race and the “criminalization of young people.”

Since then, her research has centered around these intersections, and how they impact the education and economic trajectories of youth from disadvantaged communities. Enter the FIRE (Formerly Incarcerated Research Experts) Fellowship, a program she created last year that centers the voices of formerly incarcerated young adults, and equips them with research skills.

“Like many others, I didn’t know much about the types of people who were in these facilities,” said Annamma, who is an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). “But what I found when I went into these places, was very smart and thoughtful young people who had often had really terrible social conditions put on them by adults, and that schools had a role to play in how these young people were ending up in these facilities.”

Centering community voices

FIRE Fellowship’s genesis came on the heels of a large national study for which Annamma and researchers have done nearly 100 interviews and 550 surveys of young people in various youth carceral — detention and confinement — facilities across the country to collect disability and race data. 

“The federal government does not collect disability data for incarcerated youth, so we actually don’t know how many kids with disabilities are incarcerated, let alone how many kids of color with disabilities are imprisoned,” Annamma said.

As part of the program, fellows contribute to Annamma’s research through sharing their experiences, meeting weekly to learn analytical skills, and creating a research project of their own.

“FIRE Fellows is a way for us to live out our principles and ensure that we’re investing in the youth who we are researching,” said Jennifer Wilmot, a research project manager at the GSE working with Annamma on the fellowship. “It’s a privilege to talk to young people inside these facilities and hear their experiences.”

A’Kaysha Jackson, a FIRE Fellow from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said she applied to the fellowship because she was interested in Annamma’s research, and she wanted to use her personal experiences to help further it.

“It really interested me to know that they were also looking for people who experienced being in foster care because there’s a connection between the two,” said Jackson, who is studying psychology at Southeastern University. “The biggest thing I came away with was learning that my voice matters, and that what I had to say was important, which was something I had to learn during this process.”

Equipping formerly incarcerated adults with research skills

Throughout the six-month fellowship, fellows worked on research projects using skills they developed along the way. 

“One of the purposes of the FIRE fellows was to prepare these young folks to think about themselves as researchers,” said Veronica Velez, professor of education at Western Washington University, who helped teach fellows about spatial analysis. “I think for me, being a teacher of teachers was incredibly helpful in getting me to think through how I can help reconnect the perspective that they are intellectuals and that they bring so much to the work and to believe that about themselves.”

The fellowship culminated in a research convening in November where fellows presented their projects.

“Once I completed and presented my project, I felt really proud of myself for being able to apply what I learned and put something together,” said Katrina Stewart, a a fellow studying at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, who did her research project on alternatives to school policing. “That experience really is one of the main things that pushed me to transfer to a 4-year institution this fall. Being in a community of people that actually believed in me was really transformational.”

The FIRE Fellowship will continue with its second cohort either later this year, or early 2026, with the help of new funding from a Spencer Racial Equity Research Grant, which supports “education research projects that will contribute to understanding and ameliorating racial inequality in education.”

Ultimately, Annamma says she hopes that her research, including findings from the fellowship, will shed light on the ways that youth carceral facilities are harmful to student learning and future opportunities.

“FIRE fellows is one way we can pursue corrective action. It’s sharing the education that Stanford provides for people who would never have access to it, and that to me is a really important piece of FIRE Fellows,” Annamma said. “It’s to open up the doors of Stanford, as much as we open up the doors of youth prisons, and say, you deserve access to excellent education and these skills that are normally only taught to doctoral students.”