Ayshea Banes
Credentials: Ed-GRS Fellow
Ayshea is a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction and a recent graduate of African American Studies MA. Her research uncovers the entanglement of Blackness and physics through space and time. For her master’s she conducted an archival study on Liberatory Physics and ways that Black educators in the mid-1960s engaged with this concept. Her current research focuses on ways that physics education has been weaponized to perpetuate an ideal Black woman citizen that stems from the hyper-sexualized enslaved woman.
Outside of academia, she really enjoys collecting hobbies! She loves to read, paint pottery, do Pilates, make waist beads, and watch UW-Madison’s women’s hockey team beat Ohio State!
Publications
Banes, Ayshea. 2025 “Blackness in the Evolution of Physics” Oral Presentation. 2025 Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 10-13 October 2025;
Banes, Ayshea. 2026 “Liberatory Physics: The Entanglement of Physics and Black Liberation” Oral Presentation. 2026 American Educational Research Association. Los Angeles, California. 8-12 April 2026.
Papers: Banes, A. (2025). Why I left physics to pursue physics education. The Physics Teacher, 63(8), 708–709. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0303514
Presentations
American Educational Research Association Annual Conference (AERA), April 8-12, 2026.
Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, & Social Justice (SEEDS) Conference, October 10-13, 2025.