Ashley Gwathney is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and Certified School Social Worker with a doctorate in social work from Rutgers University, where she also earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees. Throughout her academic career, she has collaborated with the Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, the New Jersey State Policy Lab, the New Jersey Scholarship Transformative Education Prisons Program, and Rural Pathways.
Before transitioning to academia, Ashley worked as a school social worker within an urban Title I and former Abbott district in New Jersey, serving as an elementary school student advisor, high school guidance counselor, McKinney-Vento building liaison, and anti-bullying specialist. In these roles, she led trauma-informed restorative practices, character education initiatives, social-emotional learning programming, and positive behavior interventions.
Her research focuses on the schooling experiences of minoritized youth, exclusionary discipline, and restorative justice practices in education. In her work, she combines grounded theory, qualitative methods, and field experience to explore research-based strategies that promote equitable, culturally responsive, and identity-affirming outcomes for marginalized students.
Ashley’s work has been published in the Clinical Social Work Journal, Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, Society for the Study of Societal Problems, and the Negro Educational Review. Her co-authored paper, Learning and Liberation: Black Home Education as a Social Movement, was presented at the 2024 American Educational Research Association annual meeting. As an equity-based researcher, she seeks to develop strategic solutions and actionable insights to address academic displacement, educational inequities, and adverse childhood experiences.