Sabina Vaught

Sabina Vaught is 2025-2026 Humphrey Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Educational Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Macalester College. An ethnographer, her scholarship considers global carceral and liberatory knowledge movements broadly and the race-gender labor and conquest relationships among schools, prisons, and self-determined peoples and communities specifically. Her most recent book, The School-Prison Trust is a co-authored ethnographic, legal, and cultural studies analysis of Indigenous self-determination and refusal in the face of school-prison state warfare. 

A faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, Sabina’s teaching has extended to Feminist Studies groups with people incarcerated in adult and juvenile prisons for state-identified women and girls. She began her teaching career as a high school language arts teacher. At Macalester, she is teaching “education & the end of empire” and will teach “Indigeneity, captivity, and life beyond empire” this spring.