Marcus Weaver-Hightower

Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower is a professor in the Foundations of Education program at Virginia Tech, where he teaches graduate courses in gender and education, the sociology of education, and qualitative research. He serves as the Foundations of Education program leader.

He is a former Fulbright scholar to Australia, where he conducted a yearlong study of the development and implementation of the world’s first federal-level policy on the education of boys. His research interests include the politics of boys’ education, masculinity studies, the politics of food, the use of comics and graphic novels in qualitative research and classrooms, and policy studies.

He is the author of Unpacking School Lunch: Understanding the Hidden Politics of School Food (Palgrave, 2022), How to Write Qualitative Research (Routledge, 2019), and The Politics of Policy in Boys’ Education: Getting Boys “Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He has coedited the collections The Problem with Boys’ Education: Beyond the Backlash (Routledge, 2009), School Food Politics: The Complex Ecologies of Hunger and Feeding in Schools Around the World (Peter Lang, 2011), Leaders in Gender and Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits (Sense Publishers, 2013), and The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education (Wiley, 2020). His scholarly articles have appeared in Educational Researcher, Review of Educational Research, Teachers College Record, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Gender and Education, The Journal of Mixed Methods Research, and Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, among others.

Marcus' work has been awarded the 2013 Anselm Strauss Award for Qualitative Family Research from the National Council on Family Relations as well as a Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association.