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/sanctuary
Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, associate professor in the Education Program at Barnard College, is an anthropologist of education. An activist scholar, her research and teaching focuses on fostering educational spaces that support young people’s sense of belonging and active civic practices. To that end, she has co-created and co-taught youth video-workshops with Al-Bustan, a Philadelphia-based Arab American Community Organization, and as co-founder and co-director of the Rutgers Graduate School of Education’s Urban Teaching Fellows program, she designed and implemented youth participatory action research programs for public schools in New Jersey. She has published two books. Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11 offers an ethnographic account of young Palestinian Americans grappling with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of September 11, 2001. 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.