Professional Biography
Dr. Hook is a Lecturer in the International Educational Development Program at Penn GSE. He holds a joint-Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies and Cultural Anthropology and a certificate in African Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), an M.S.Ed. in International Educational Development from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.Sc. in Africa and International Development from the University of Edinburgh.
Dr. Hook’s research examines the political economy of international educational development and global governance in sub-Saharan Africa. His research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, a National Academy of Education and Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, and several Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships. His work has been published in Comparative Education Review, Anthropological Forum, and by Education International.
While at UW-Madison, Dr. Hook served as a Fellow at the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative (WEC), a research and evaluation group that aims to perform culturally responsive and equitable evaluations. Dr. Hook’s work at WEC included research on teacher training and racial bias in Higher Education STEM fields, evaluating the impact of school feeding programs, and examining how parents, teachers, and corporate partners navigate community school programs.
Prior to his doctoral studies, Dr. Hook worked as a teacher in Chicago, Burundi, Thailand, and Japan, as a teacher trainer with the Peace Corps in Malawi, and as an Educational Specialist for UNESCO-International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa.
Dr. Hook’s research explores the corporatization, financialization, and racialization of international educational and social development in West Africa. His dissertation and publications particularly examine the impact of a recent education reform in Liberia that outsources public primary schools to largely international for-profit school management firms, analyzing how a variety of international, national, and local stakeholder are experiencing and navigating this reform that merges profit-making with social impact, while highlighting the ways in which local communities are creating alternatives (or “otherwise worlds”) to the corporatized schooling model. Dr. Hook is currently preparing a manuscript based off this work and research into a similar results-based funding program in Sierra Leone.
Additional research includes analysis of corporate social responsibility initiatives by agricultural and mineral concessions in West Africa and a Spencer Foundation-funded collaborative project with scholars at Cambridge University that explores the racialized and gendered political economy of venture capitalist investments in K–12 education and educational technology during COVID-19.
