Walter S. Gershon (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Critical Foundations of Education at Rowan University (New Jersey, United States). Dr. Gershon’s scholarly interests focus on questions of justice, dignity, and access, often using critical understandings in sound and the senses to consider everyday experiences with disenfranchised city kids and youth. Walter approaches these research interests through three deeply interrelated areas of study: how people make sense, the sociocultural processes that inform their sensibilities, and the qualitative methodologies used to study the educational ecologies that render such understandings sensible.
Walter is also an Afro-Caribbean percussionist, saxophonist, and educator. As a musician, Walter has played with a wide variety of musicians and musical traditions including Mansour (Persian pop), Rod Poole, Dana Reason, Badal Roy, and poets Quincy Troupe and Eintou Springer, as well as forming free/grove collective Erroneous Funk with Renee Coloumbe and Mark Graham. His current projects include free improvisation group Imaginary Lines Quartet (Brandon Davis, bass; Gershon, saxophones and percussion; Jonathan Kay, saxophones; and Joe Sorbara, Druns), Neo-soul group Braylynn & the Beards, a collective improvising group with Norwegians Sunniva Hovde and Tor Einar Bekken, and R&B/Groove Band BTO.