Faculty Mentors for 2021 CIWF

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of Education at Barnard College, Columbia University, and affiliated faculty in the Anthropology of Education program at Teachers college. Abu El-Haj is an anthropologist of education and former President of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. For the past two decades, Abu El-Haj’s research has explored questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict. She is currently working on two projects. In a recent publication, Fifi the punishing cat and other civic lessons from a Lebanese public kindergarten, in the Journal of Education in Emergencies, she and her colleagues write about their longitudinal collaborative ethnographic study of public kindergartens in Beirut, Lebanon, focusing on the hidden curriculum of civic education that emerges in the context of conflict and refugee policy. With the support of the Spencer Foundation, she is principal investigator of a recently completed national focus group study exploring the civic identities and civic practices of youth from American Muslim immigrant communities and their experiences growing up in the post 9/11 U.S. Her second book, an ethnographic account of young Palestinian Americans grappling with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of September 11, 2001, won the 2016 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award (Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11, University of Chicago Press, 2015). Other publications about this research have appeared in Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Curriculum Inquiry; Educational Policy; Harvard Educational Review; Theory into Practice; and the Review of Research in Education. Her first book, Elusive Justice: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday Practice (Routledge, 2006), offers a critical account of the range of justice claims at play inside real schools, exploring several different, important dimensions of educational equity that are often ignored in contemporary educational policy debates.

Django Paris is a Black educator and scholar born on Ohlone homelands in San Francisco, California to a White mother and a Black Jamaican father. Paris is honored to be the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington. His teaching and research focus on sustaining languages, literacies, and lifeways among Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander students in the context of ongoing resurgence, decolonization, liberation, and justice movements in and beyond schools.  He is particularly concerned with educational and cultural justice as outcomes of inquiry and pedagogy. Paris is author of Language across Difference: Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools (2011), and co-editor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (2014), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (2017) and  Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square.

Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary writer, educator, and researcher. Her research focuses on the ways that schooling often acts as a conduit for oppression and the long history and constant potential for education to be a tool for liberation. She is the award-winning author Youth held at the Border: Immigration and the politics of inclusion from Teachers College Press and Decolonizing Educational Research: From ownership to answerability, from Routledge. She has published in many academic outlets and has written and been interviewed for wide audiences in outlets such as The Atlantic, The Feminist Wire, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, NPR, Beacon Broadside, and Racialicious. Her forthcoming book from Beacon Press is entitled: No study without struggle: Confronting settler colonialism in higher education. Her walk-on song is Can I Kick It by a Tribe Called Quest.

Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. He teaches courses in curriculum theory, the arts in education, and popular culture. His articles have been published in education journals like the Harvard Educational Review, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, the Review of Educational Research, and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. His book, The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School (Harvard University Press, 2009) is based on a two-year ethnographic study of the lives of students at an elite boarding school in the US. He is co-editor of the collections Cultural Studies and Education: Perspective on Theory, Methodology, and Practice (with Heather Harding and Tere Sordé-Martí, 2003, Harvard Education Press), Curriculum Work as a Public Moral Enterprise (with James Sears, 2004, Rowman and Littlefield), and most recently, Educating Elites: Class Privilege and Educational Advantage (with Adam Howard, 2010, Rowman & Littlefield). His current research focuses on the experiences of young artists attending specialized arts high schools in cities across Canada and the United States. He is also Principal Investigator of the project Youth Solidarities Across Borders, a participatory action research project with Latin@ and Urban Aboriginal youth in the Toronto District Board. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between creativity and solidarity. He is particularly interested in the creative possibilities that arise from the social and cultural dynamics of urban centers. The movements and encounters that define urban spaces generate particular cultural dynamics with the potential to reshape human relations.