Maverick Yunqiang Zhang

Dr. Zhang is a writer, researcher, teacher educator, and activist. Over the past decade, they have engaged in a number of sociopolitical activities in Hong Kong SAR and the state of Georgia.

• Ph.D. Language and Literacy Education, University of Georgia
• M.A. TESOL and Sociolinguistics, City University of Hong Kong

Both my teaching and research are justice-oriented, interdisciplinary, and entangled with our everyday social, political, and cultural lives. I see classrooms as sites of power where various discourses are produced, contested, and reproduced. I use embodied, participatory, and culturally sustaining approaches to support diverse students in critically engaging with complex curriculum materials and addressing real-world problems across time, space, and media.

Dr. Zhang’s scholarship deals with the complexity of multicultural and multilingual education in connection with various issues such as those around race, class, nationality, and sociopolitical struggles. Their research interests include (but are not limited to) discourse studies, teacher education, multicultural-lingual education, embodiment, critical posthumanism, post-qualitative inquiry, and functional linguistics.

• Zhang, M. Y. (2024). Functional linguistics in life: An embodied approach in teacher education. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 1-29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2024-0066
• Zhang, M. Y. (2023). Loneliness, ethnicity, and our entangled relationship with the others. BILD. McGill University.
• Zhang, M. Y. (2022). Neoliberalism, critical literacy, and the everyday: A post-qual informed multi-genre inquiry. Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 18(2), 1-24.
• Zhang, M. Y. (2022). Embodiment in action: Engaging with the doing and be(com)ing. Linguistics and Education, 71(3), 1-13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101082
• Zhang, M. Y., Harman, R., Aghasafari, S., & Delahunty, M. B. (2021). Multimodal composing in a multilingual classroom: Design-based research and embodied systemic functional linguistics. In D. Shin., T. Cimasko, & Y, Yi. (Eds.), Multimodal composing in K-16 ESL and EFL education (pp. 35–53). Springer.
• Wright, W. T., & Zhang, M. Y. (2021). Poststructuralism. In S. A. Shelton & K, Strunk. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Queer Studies in Education (pp. 452-455). Brill.
• Fu, S., Harman, R., & Zhang, M. Y. (2021). Critical creative out of the box thinking in COVID times. School-University Partnerships, 14(3), 238-259.
• Zhang, M. Y. (2020). The nexus of doing, knowing, and being. Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 16(1), 1-3.

• Co-Investigator, Aralee Strange Fund for Art and Poetry, 2018-2023 (Endowment housed in the Georgia Museum of Art)