About

Micah Card (she/they) is a writer/artist, educator, and researcher in Santa Cruz, CA.

Currently a doctoral candidate at The University of California, Santa Cruz, Micah is an interdisciplinary scholar of culture, knowledge, and power. Their current research centers on the workforce and political economy of early childhood education (ECE), specifically how cultural-historical narratives around race, gender, labor, and science shape the working conditions and politics of expertise in the field. From this perspective, Micah uses qualitative methods and critical theories to examine and illuminate the lived experiences of early educators across policy contexts.

Micah’s credentials include an M.A. in Education, a B.A. in Gender Studies, and an Early Childhood Associate Teacher credential from the American Montessori Society. She has also served as a California Mentor Teacher, certified by the California Early Childhood Mentor Program, UCSC Graduate Pedagogy Fellow, and Professional Development Teaching Fellow for the UCSC Department of Education.

Over two a two-decade career in education, Micah has likewise published and presented work on progressive early childhood education, constructivist pedagogies, critical media literacy, and intersectional perspectives on children’s rights and the ECE workforce. Micah recently wrote the teaching guide for "The Media and Me" (2022), published by Censored Press.

A lifelong writer, musician, and artist, every part of Micah’s work and pedagogy has been shaped and rendered more meaningful by her own experience as a creative agent. She has published works of creative nonfiction and poetry, including A Series of Engagements, a chapbook of poems written in and about formal art spaces published by tenderness lit. Her writing has also been published by Vagina::The Zine, Lummox Press, and in the 2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, among others. Her work has been shortlisted for the 2017 Lummox Press Poetry Contest and the 11th Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award. 

Micah’s visual and performance art has previously been featured in group shows in the Central Valley and Bay Area of California. In 2009, she was honored to join Maris Bustamante and Megan Geary as part of “Ink Ac(complies).” The performance project served as an expression of solidarity with the legacy of Bustamante’s and Monica Mayor’s transformational work in the feminist art group Polvo De Gallina Negra — solidarity she continues to express intellectually, politically, and aesthetically in all aspects of her work (as well as on her arm).