Thea Abu El-Haj
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Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Professor in Education, is an anthropologist of education. Abu El-Haj’s research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict. Funded by the Spencer Foundation, her current research entitled, “Disrupting Dispossession: Teaching Palestine in Exile, 1970-1990” is an oral history project with Palestinian teachers in Lebanon examining their everyday work as civic and political actors in the Palestinian movement for liberation. In other recent work, she has explored the civic lives of children and youth in Lebanon and the U.S. With the support of a Spencer Foundation grant, she was principal investigator of a US national interview study, Unequal Citizens, exploring the civic identities and civic practices of youth from Muslim immigrant communities in the U.S. In an earlier study, she and her colleagues write about their longitudinal collaborative ethnographic study of public kindergartens in Beirut, Lebanon, that focuses on questions of implicit civic education in conflict-affected contexts.
Abu El-Haj is the author of two books. Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11, is an ethnographic account of young Palestinian Americans grappling with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of September 11, 2001. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015, it won the 2016 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award. Her first book, Elusive Justice: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday Practice (Routledge, 2006) explores important dimensions of educational equity that are often ignored in contemporary educational policy debates.
Abu El-Haj is the recipient of the 2024 George and Louise Spindler Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. She is also the 2024 recipient of the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education. Abu El-Haj is past-president of the Council on Anthropology and Education.
- PhD, University of Pennsylvania
- MA, Bryn Mawr College
- BA, Swarthmore College
- Anthropology of Education
- Urban Education
- Migration and Education
- Youth Citizenship
- Muslim American and Arab American Youth
- EDUC BC 1510 Educational Foundations
- EDUC BC 3032 Contemporary Issues in Education
- EDUC BC 3040 Migration, Globalization, and Education
- EDUC BC 3044 Education and Social Change in Comparative Global Contexts
- EDUC BC 3063 Elementary Student Teaching in Urban Schools
- EDUC BC 3064 Critical Inquiry in Urban Teaching
- American Educational Studies Association Book Critics Award for Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11
- Fellowship, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University. Schooling Palestinian American youth during the “War on Terror”: Gender, sexuality, and the U.S. neo-colonial imaginary
- Jere E. Brophy Outstanding Article Award for Becoming citizens in an era of globalization and transnational migration: Re-imagining citizenship as critical practice. In Theory into Practice
- Fellowship, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University. Gender, citizenship and community activism: Lessons from an Arab American community arts organization
- American Anthropological Association
- American Educational Research Association
- Urban Teacher Education Consortium
Presentations / Recent Lectures
Education that “breaks your heart”: Learning and teaching in the Lebanese Conflict Zone. 3rd Conference on Anthropology and Education. Teachers College. (October 27, 2018)
Who will save the children: Feminist perspectives on the contradictions of education in states of in/security and crisis. Distinguished Lecture, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (April, 2017)
Belonging in transnational times: Mobilizing transnational citizenship and rights in an age of securitization. Czech Association of Social Anthropologists (September 30, 2016)
From national subjects to transnational citizens: Educating im/migrant youth for the 21st Century. University of Buffalo, Graduate School of Education (April 1, 2015)
“Educating for justice: Four principles for building inclusive schools.” Arab Resource Collective Regional Conference, “Inclusive education and diversity in the early years.” Beirut, Lebanon. (2009)
“Practicing for educational justice: Four principles for building inclusive schools.” Minnesota, Department of Education, 2009 Statewide conference on integration. “Knowledge, understanding and appreciation: Empowering Minnesota teachers for successful integration.” Minneapolis, MN. (2009)
Is transnationalism good for democracy: Palestinian American youth on rights, citizenship, and justice. Barnard College Forum on Migration (November 7, 2018)
“This is not my America” Or is it? Palestinian American youth confronting everyday nationalism from 9/11 to Trump. University of California, Los Angeles (January 25, 2018)
“Are you or are you not an American”: Palestinian American youth and the everyday politics of nationalism in US schools. CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY (April 13, 2016)
Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11. Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (February 9, 2016)
Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11. American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon (October 28, 2015)
“Having an identity without a place in the world”: Palestinian American youths’ transnational citizenship practices. Princeton University Asian American Students Association (November 20, 2014)
Publications
Abu El-Haj, T.R. (2015). Unsettled belonging: Educating Palestinian American youth after 9/11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2006). Elusive justice: Wrestling with difference and educational equity in everyday practice. New York: Routledge.
Dyrness, A. & Abu El-Haj, T.R. (June 2020). Reflections from the field: The democratic citizenship formation of transnational youth. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 51 (2), 165-177. DOI: 10.1111/aeq.12294
Abu El-Haj, T. R. (March, 2020). Everything in the forest is the forest: Council on Anthropology and Education Past President’s Address. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 51(1), 5-14. DOI: 10.1111/aeq.12326
Ghaffar-Kucher, A. & Abu El-Haj, T. R. (Fall, 2018). Exit East: The fight against US anti-Muslim racism. (Invited Essay) The Assembly: A journal of public scholarship in education. Issue 1. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado.
Abu El-Haj, T. R., Kaloustian, G., Bonet, S, & Chatila, S. (August, 2018). Fifi the punishing cat and other civic lessons from a Lebanese public kindergarten. Journal of Education in Emergencies 4 (1), 13-44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17609/xnpr-ce74
Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2017). Afterward. (Invited Essay) Anthropology and Education Quarterly 48 (4), 427-430.
Bonet, S. & Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2020). Reading over our shoulders: Writing about Arab youth, families, and communities in the post 9/11 U.S. In T. McCarty and A. Arshad (Editors), Critical youth research in education: Methodologies and praxis. New York: Routledge
Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2019). Creating safety while embracing discomfort: An anti-oppressive mandate for schooling in a diverse democracy. In M. Levinson and J. Fay Democratic Discord in Schools: Cases and Commentaries in Educational Ethics. Harvard Education Press
Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2019). Considering rights and self-determination with injustice and unequal power in mind. In A.J. Hahn Tapper and M. Sucharov (Eds.), Social Justice and Israel/Palestine: Foundational and Contemporary Debates. University of Toronto Press
Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2015). Geographies of citizenship: Muslim youth in post 9/11 U.S. In T. Skelton (Ed.), Conflict, Violence, and Peace. Volume 11 of Geographies of Children and Youth, Springer, Singapore. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-4585-98-9_11-1
Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2015). Belonging in troubling times: Considerations from the vantage point of Arab American immigrant youth. In J. Wyn and H. Cahill (Eds.), Handbook of Children and Youth Studies, 433-445. Springer, Singapore.