Profile

Professor McGregor’s current project is studying how the material things and spaces of schools, specifically bathrooms, affect teaching and learning. She’s written about what lack of access to bathrooms means for teachers, and her current project looks at how bathrooms have influenced learning historically in the United States, as well as at her current field site, a middle school in Oregon.

She also writes about how to do this kind of research: what theoretical framing and methods make sense if we are trying to understand students’ and teachers’ experiences of a material place, particularly when that place is taboo? She draws on feminist phenomenologists (Alcoff, de Beauvoir, Mann, Marion Young) and feminist new materialists (Alaimo, Barad, Bennet, Haraway, Puar) to imagine a methodology that takes seriously how matter comes to matter.