Karis Jones, Ph.D.

Dr. Karis Jones is an assistant professor of English Education for the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Baylor University. As a literacy scholar, learning scientist, teacher educator, and community organizer, her research relates to issues of equity in literacies learning and writing across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces. She taught middle and high school English in Brooklyn and served as a literacy consultant for the New York City Department of Education’s Research and Policy Support Group. She is PI/Co-PI on research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Sociological Institute Foundation, the International Literacy Association (ILA), and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). She has received funding for community partnerships through Humanities New York, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and the Wycoff Family Foundation. She was a 2020-21 Public Humanities Fellow.

Dr. Jones’s research agenda is based on her teaching experiences serving culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse students across formal and informal settings, and her work supports innovative and creative ways of addressing complex issues in literacies research and ELA education. 

The three strands of her work include:

1. playful and affectively charged literacies: examining embodied, digital, and multimodal literacies as they play out in informal cultural learning spaces like fandoms and gaming communities
2. disrupting inequitable formal structures: critically examining and reimagining formal and informal schooling structures, focused on moving instruction, assessment, and policies toward social justice
3. designing hybrid learning contexts: drawing from youth-centric contexts (e.g. fandom and gaming) to design more equitable and engaging formal and informal learning spaces. 

Her research is published in journals such as the Journal of Literacy Research, Equity & Excellence in Education; Teaching and Teacher Education; Journal of Language & Literacy Education; Linguistics and Education; English Teaching: Practice & Critique; Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy; Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education -- English Education; and English Journal. Her book, Fandoms in the Classroom: A Social Justice Approach to Transforming Literacy Learning, written with Dr. Scott Storm, was published in 2025. She received the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Literature SIG’s 2022 Shelby Wolf Award for Outstanding Dissertation, and the Writing & Literacies SIG’s 2025 Steve Cahir Early Career Award for Research on Writing. She served on the Executive Board of AERA’s Writing & Literacies SIG and the Research Committee for the Literacy Research Association. 

As a community organizer, she is dedicated to advocacy for public education. In her work with the organization Jersey City Together, she supported advocacy around district budgets and water remediation as well as listening campaigns for Spanish and Arabic-speaking parents; these initiatives contributed to a $53 million increase in local funding in Jersey City as well as safe drinking water for 23,000 students across 32 public schools in the district.

Links:
More about Dr. Jones's work — https://www.karisjonesphd.com/ 
Dr. Jones on Instagram — @tofandomandbeyond
Dr. Jones on Bluesky — @karismjones.bsky.social
Free games developed by Dr. Jones and colleagues: https://karisjones.itch.io/