Dr. A. A. Akom is an Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology and Africana Studies and Co-Director of Educational Equity at the Cesar Chavez Institute at San Francisco State University. He received his undergraduate degree at University of California at Berkeley, his Masters in Education and teaching credential from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in (2004). Akom’s commitment to serve under-represented and low-income communities is reflected in his teaching, community activism, research and publications.

Akom is not an armchair academic he is a scholar-activist, always connecting academia to community action. He is committed to improving our public schools. In 2001 Dr. Akom, along with a group of concerned parents and community-based organizations, co-founded Academic Pathways, an innovative youth development and educational intervention program designed to assist and empower African American, Latino, and under-resourced high school students to excel academically, enter meaningful professions, and experience the American Dream of upward mobility that’s associated with quality education. Academic Pathways, and organizations like it, suggest to our entire country that we as a nation can become a more just, more equitable society, where race does not determine ones life chances and where education serves to open the doors of opportunity rather than close them, as it currently does for so many youth of color.

His research interests include: Urban ethnography, Urban sociology, racial identity formation, youth culture, poverty, sociology of education, and African Diaspora. He is winner of the 2002 AERA minority dissertation award and has served as a state-sponsored consultant examining educational inequality in high poverty low achieving schools. Dr. Akom’s articles have appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Sociology of Education, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, as well as popular magazines such as Blaze and The Nation. His current project is a comparative urban ethnography of forms and mechanisms of racial domination in the Bay area as they relate to educational achievement, youth development, and racial identity formation.