Ashley Gwathney

Ashley Gwathney is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Certified School Social Worker with a doctorate in social work from Rutgers University, where she also earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees. Throughout her academic career, she has collaborated with the Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, the New Jersey State Policy Lab, the New Jersey Scholarship Transformative Education Prisons Program, and Rural Pathways. As the postdoctoral associate for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures at Rutgers–Newark, she has helped to coordinate seminars on disability justice, transitional justice, racial justice, and environmental justice. Before transitioning to academia, Ashley worked as a school social worker within an urban Title I and former Abbott district in New Jersey, serving as an elementary school student advisor, high school guidance counselor, McKinney-Vento building liaison, and anti-bullying specialist. In these roles, she led trauma-informed restorative practices, character education initiatives, social-emotional learning programming, and positive behavior interventions. Her research focuses on the schooling experiences of minoritized youth, exclusionary discipline, and restorative justice practices in education. In her work, she combines grounded theory, qualitative methods, and field experience to explore research-based strategies that promote equitable, culturally responsive, and identity-affirming outcomes for marginalized students. Ashley’s work has been published in the Clinical Social Work Journal, Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, Society for the Study of Societal Problems, and the Negro Educational Review. Her co-authored paper, Learning and Liberation: Black Home Education as a Social Movement, was presented at the 2024 American Educational Research Association annual meeting. As an equity-based researcher, she seeks to develop strategic solutions and actionable insights to address academic displacement, educational inequities, and adverse childhood experiences.

Publications:

• Santana, E., Walsh, P., Gwathney, A.N., Payne, C., Majewski, K., Wingfield J., Simpson, P., Neyman, J. (2025). New Jersey Department of Education Promising Practices Project: Qualitative Findings. New Jersey State Policy Lab and Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies.

• Gwathney, A.N. (2024). Through a social workers lens: Examining school administrators discipline perspectives and practices. Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/15313204.2024.2372268

• Gwathney, A. N., & Anderson, C. (2024). Caught in the crossfire: Anti-CRT measures and K-12 education. In K. M. Budd et al. (Eds.), Agenda for social justice 3: Solutions for 2024. Policy Press

• Gwathney, A.N. (2021). Offsetting racial divides: Adolescent African American males & restorative justice practices. Clinical Social Work Journal. 49, 346–355. Advanced online publication. doi:10.1007/s10615-021-00794-z

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Gwathney A.N., Steele, L., Shallish, L. (2025, April 10). Reparative Futures: Higher Education, Reparations, and Disability. Eugenics and the Body Symposium at Wheaton College

• Cooner, L., Payne C., Campbell, V., Majewski, K., Santana, E., Walsh, P., Gwathney A.N., Whitfield J., & Simpson, P. (2025, April 7). NJ Department of Education Promising Practices Summit. New Jersey Department of Education

• Shallish, L., Steele, L, & Gwathney A.N. (2025, March 4). Reparative Futures: Higher Education, Disability, and Reparations. Penn State Graduates in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 2025 Conference.

Previous Organizations: 

• Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies

• New Jersey State Policy Lab

• New Jersey Scholarship Transformative Education Prisons

• Rural Pathways

Accomplishments:

• Postdoctoral Associate  Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series

• Co-Author on New Jersey Department of Education Promising Practices Project: Qualitative Findings

Upcoming Projects:

• Anderson, C., & Gwathney, A. N. (Accepted; expected publication 2025). Learning and liberation: Black home education as a social movement. Negro Educational Review.

• Shallish, L., Steele, L, & Gwathney A.N. (Under review; expected publication 2025). Higher Education, Disability Studies, Reparations. Oxford University Press.

• New Jersey Scholarship Transformative Education Prisons Self-Study

Relatively little scholarship has examined zero-tolerance discipline in K-12 schools as an authoritarian practice rooted in eugenic ideologies of racism, criminalization, segregation, and displacement. Even fewer have examined the growing convergence between exclusionary school discipline and the educational technology surveillance industry (EdTech), which includes artificial intelligence-based behavior detection, facial recognition, mental health monitoring, social media surveillance, and live video surveillance monitored by law enforcement. These technologies are not only reshaping school climates but also reinforcing punitive logics that disproportionately impact Black, Brown, disabled, and other historically marginalized students. Importantly, the implications of merging carceral practice and EdTEch industry raises urgent questions about how surveillance-driven practices perpetuate and reinforce harmful educational, biopsychosocial, and ecological outcomes for K-12 students and the broader society. These impacts are not only social and educational, they are environmental, reflecting long-standing dimensions of racial injustices.

Rutgers University – Newark was awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation to organize a Sawyer Seminar Series titled Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures. The Sawyer Seminar, led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado, co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), and hosted at Rutgers-Newark during the 2024-2025 academic year, will explore themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution, to illuminate common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflects not only the scholarly interests of our faculty, but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University- Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community.

https://sawyerseminar.newark.rutgers.edu/