Andrea P Herrera, PhD is a sociologist and adjunct professor of sociology and gender & sexuality studies.
Dr. Herrera has been teaching university courses since 2008 in Texas, Missouri, and Oregon across the fields of sociology, ethnic studies, rhetoric/composition, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, including developmental (“remedial”) writing courses at the pre-freshman level as well as advanced social theory seminars offered in honors college departments. Dr. Herrera’s award-winning pedagogy has been described by students as “transformative” and is based on the principle that good teaching critically reorients students to society (an idea derived from the work of scholar Paolo Freire). In recent years Dr. Herrera has taught at the University of Oregon, Missouri State University, and Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi.
Publications from Dr. Herrera engage topics such as discourses of sexual violence at universities, theories of identity, community, and selfhood, and strategies for eliminating inequalities through scholar-activism. Their scholarship builds upon Dr. Cathy J. Cohen’s work on radical solidarity and advances a ripple-effect theory of social change in which feelings at the micro level animate interactional and (sub)cultural shifts at the meso level which then ripple outward and upward to restructure and help dismantle systems of normalizing power at the macro level. This theory of inequality posits that individuals can and do enact shifts in systems of inequality and thus avoids the “nothing we do really matters” trap that features in many large-scale theories of systemic inequalities. This perspective enables Dr. Herrera to share a research-based sense of optimism with undergraduate students seeking to address the many inequalities they witness and experience.