Ethan Chang

About Ethan

Ethan is a Japanese and Chinese educator and community-based scholar. He was born and raised in Kailua and currently resides in Mānoa. He is an assistant professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in the Department of Educational Administration.

Ethan's research extends Equity Oriented, Collaborative, Community-Based Research (EOCCBR): a methodology that centers ethics in an effort to produce knowledge that is answerable to families and young people who U.S. public schools have historically failed to serve. His published work on these and related topics can be found in QSE, Harvard Educational Review, Educational Policy, Discourse, and elsewhere.

"We all have the middle word. Everything came through us from somebody because of somebody else." - Prof. George Lipsitz

Middle Word Scholarship

George Lipsitz observed that, in academia, we're often encouraged to have the first or last word–to be the first to discover something new or to announce the final, grand theory. But Lipsitz counters, "We all have the middle word. Everything came through us from somebody because of somebody else.” To engage in a praxis of the middle word “is to be a part of the conversation, to push it along since there’s no problem we can say I have the answer to, but in every problem, we have to think about how we have the answer.” In the spirit of middle-word scholarship, here are a few texts I've been reading that I think move conversations on education and liberation forward.

Texts I am Reading

Thomas, E. E. (2019). The dark fantastic: Race and the imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press.

Hemphill, P. (2024). What it takes to heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world. Penguin Random House.

Rose, M. (2023). When the Light Goes on: The Life-changing Wonder of Learning in an Age of Metrics, Screens, and Diminished Human Connection. Beacon Press.

Lipsitz, G. (2024). The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. Univ of California Press.

Van Dooren, T. (2022). A world in a shell: Snail stories for a time of extinctions. MIT Press.

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