Cinzia Pica

Visiting Scholar
Cinzia Pica is a Professor of Human Services at Assumption University in Worcester, MA in the United States. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the Immigration Initiative at Harvard.

Cinzia Pica is a Professor of Human Services at Assumption University in Worcester, United States. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the Immigration Initiative at Harvard. She has focused her work on issues of racial and economic justice in schools, youth’s intergroup friendships in school settings (both in the U.S. and in Italy), and intercultural education initiatives in Europe. Dr. Pica’s first book (co-authored with Carmen Veloria and Rina Manuela Contini), Social Justice Education in European Multiethnic Schools: Addressing the Goals of Intercultural Education (2019) was awarded the American Educational Studies Association’s 2019 Critics’ Choice Book Award. Her second book, an edited collection (also edited with her colleagues, Carmen Veloria and Rina Manuela Contini), titled Intercultural Education: Critical Perspectives, Pedagogical Challenges and Promising Practices earned a 2023 Society of Professors of Education, Outstanding Book Award, Honorable Mention. Her forthcoming edited volume, edited with colleague Alessandro Bergamaschi, is titled Intergroup Contact, Friendship and Prejudice Reduction in Multiethnic Schools, and will be out in June 2025. Her work on the raced, classed, and gendered deficit discourses related to so-called “at risk” youth earned a Distinguished Paper Award by the American Educational Research Association, and she has been honored by the Association for Childhood Education International for her research on interracial friendship research in children. Her scholarship on interracial friendships and prejudice reduction has been featured in the U.S. media through a TEDx talk and several National Public Radio (NPR) programs including Code Switch, the Academic Minute and 51%.