Vo Ram Yoon

Vo Ram Yoon (him/his) is a doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster at the Berkeley School of Education. Ethnically Korean and raised in Bolivia, his passion for advancing social justice and equity in education have been shaped by his international upbringing and witnessing how privilege and marginalization manifest in education from the classrooms of Chicago Public Schools to the private English academies in Tokyo. His research interests include the impact of EdTech on K-12 schools, the racialization of AAPI students, and the relationship between schools and the nonprofit industrial complex. Vo's values and praxis as an emergent scholar are shaped by queer theory, cripistemology, and decoloniality.

Prior to coming to the BSE, Vo was a Senior Data and Evaluation Consultant at the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, where he partnered with public school districts on equity assessments examining the extent that school and district policies were effectively serving marginalized students. As an evaluator, he integrated the tenets of CritQuant into his statistical analysis, used StoryMaps in lieu of conventional PDF reports to make findings more accessible, and published blog posts in AEA365 on applying diverse methods in evaluation, such as photovoice and structural topic modeling. His work has been recognized by the American Evaluation Association with the President's Award, which recognizes emergent and established evaluators whose work has uplifted the voices of today’s youth, the historically underrepresented, and/or the typically unheard.

Outside of academia, Vo enjoys doing tarot readings, watching found footage horror films, and reading the works of his favorite poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Eve Ewing, and Chen Chen. He can often be found looking at the moon, drinking copious cups of green tea, and wading through the streams of queer temporality to bring forth a world without prisons and cops.