Dr. Brittney Nathaniel (she/her) is an international researcher and practitioner in postsecondary education, with over 15 years of professional experience across the American and Scottish tertiary education systems. She is an advocate for lifelong learning and combating inequities in access to higher education for adult learners from marginalized and historically excluded communities. Her practice has included working with adult returners, first-gen students, asylum seekers and refugees, and other systemically excluded learners as they navigate often complex life circumstances while also pursuing their postsecondary education.

 

Dr. Nathaniel’s research often employs a multilevel qualitative approach, examining how individual, institutional, and policy factors shape access to and participation in higher education. She is a systems change thinker, operating from the perspective that inequities do not occur in isolation, but rather, are produced and sustained across interconnected systems. Her work is informed by the transformative research tradition and lived experience-centered approaches, with a particular focus on the impact of intersecting identities, including race, gender, socioeconomic status/class, and disability on educational experiences and trajectories.

 

Her research interests include the relationship between education and improved health, social, and economic outcomes; institutional responses to global health crises; digital poverty and digital exclusion; the experiences of students from marginalized and historically excluded communities at "elite" or "prestigious" universities; and formal learning in “non-traditional” or community-based spaces, such as prison education programs, libraries, and community centers.

 

Dr. Nathaniel holds an MA in Higher and Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a PhD in Education from the University of Glasgow.