Mike Mena, Ph.D. is a Mexican American researcher and Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Mena's work focuses on the ideological perceptions of race and language in the context of American education. For his doctoral research, Mena was awarded the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship (2021). As an educational technologist and public intellectual, Mena has facilitated numerous digital pedagogy workshops at universities across the United States. Mena's award-winning YouTube channel, "The Social Life of Language," serves as an activist pedagogical model to those interested in producing engaging educational content designed to engage wider publics. His videos are currently being used in over 30 universities.