Dr. Dixson Executive Director, Education and Civil Rights Initiative, in the College of Education at the University of Kentucky and Professor, of Educational Leadership Studies. Her research primarily focuses on how race, class, and gender intersect and impact educational equity in urban schooling contexts. She locates her research within two theoretical frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Black feminist theories. Dr. Dixson and her colleague, Celia K. Rousseau-Anderson, edited CRT in Education: All God's Children Got a Song (2006, Routledge), which was one of the first book-length texts on CRT in education. She is also a co-editor with Marvin Lynn, of the Handbook of Critical Race Theory and Education. Most recently, Dr. Dixson has been interested in how educational equity is mediated by school reform policies in the urban south. Specifically, she is interested in school reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, how local actors make sense of and experience those reform policies, and how those policies become, or are "racialized." Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Dixson is the recipient of multiple awards and honors for her research on CRT. In 2021, she was inducted as a Fellow in the American Educational Research Association.
For the 2022-2023 school year, Dr. Dixson will be on leave from the University of Kentucky to serve as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation its new Race Equity Program and the Eddie Bernice Johnson NSF INCLUDES Program.