Papers by Roozbeh Shirazi
Routledge eBooks, Sep 7, 2022
Comparative Education Review
Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism, 2012
Social Studies Research and Practice, 2015
This paper explores the possibilities of engaging in cross-disciplinary research to generate soci... more This paper explores the possibilities of engaging in cross-disciplinary research to generate social studies curricula that disrupt singular historical constructions about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), specifically for US high school teachers and students. As part of a larger multi-sited study that investigated and analyzed the common categories used to describe and teach MENA in US World History textbooks, the team engaged in multidisciplinary scholarship on the region to (1) review and analyze the five most widely adopted high school World History textbooks in the US; (2) share analyses with researchers and experts in the fields of MENA studies, history, and religion; (3) synthesize and integrate innovative scholarship on the region for potential curricula; and (4) generate robust alternative curricula for Grades 9-12 teachers. The authors, consequently, consider how educational research spurs innovative and culturally relevant curricular interventions for high school te...
Journal of Teacher Education, 2022
Contributing to a growing body of research on acknowledging U.S. imperialism within teacher educa... more Contributing to a growing body of research on acknowledging U.S. imperialism within teacher education, this article explores how knowledge production on Iran—and U.S.-Iran relations more broadly—in secondary education represents a site of what Britzman has called difficult knowledge. Here, the difficulty of classroom engagements with the theme of U.S. imperialism is highlighted in several epistemic stumbling blocks, notably notions of White epistemic authority, neoliberal multiculturalism, and imperial feeling. Drawing upon data collected during a 9-month ethnographic study, the analysis presents classroom scenes from a high school world literature unit on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, selected by the teacher to explore themes of colonialism, imperialism, and revolution. Despite these intentions, classroom engagements with the text often reproduced Orientalist understandings. These findings inform the concluding argument that mobilizes contrapuntal reading as a generative technique ...
Comparative Education, 2020
ABSTRACT In this article, we explore how locally situated educational practices and policies aime... more ABSTRACT In this article, we explore how locally situated educational practices and policies aimed at inclusion and integration may contribute to racialised exclusion for students. Our analysis brings together two ethnographic studies of how minoritised Muslim youth navigate secondary schooling in Denmark and the US. Our cases illustrate how assumptions held by school staff toward the youth in our studies were rooted in both Islamophobic tropes and deeply held nationalist beliefs about the benevolence of the US and Denmark. Cindi Katz's notion of ‘countertopography’ is critical to our argument that Islamophobia is productive of similar practices of surveillance and exclusion across disparate educational settings. As an analytical framework, countertopography opens important possibilities for critical and comparative qualitative inquiry, with specific promise for highlighting how seemingly dissimilarly educational spaces may be imbued with similar social meanings, and how these meanings are constituted by recurring unequal social relations between individuals and groups therein.
Comparative Education Review, 2019
Drawing upon ethnographic and case study research conducted across two educational settings in th... more Drawing upon ethnographic and case study research conducted across two educational settings in the United States, this article examines emergent spaces and practices of education that result from, or are affected by, the presence of minoritized diasporic communities. In light of ongoing currents of xenophobia in the United States and practices of racialization in everyday experiences of schooling, I argue that these diasporic educational spaces work as counterspaces of epistemic possibility, in which conceptions of identity and belonging—ones that are often foreclosed in the mainstream and predominantly white educational spaces—become viable. Examining the cultural production within these spaces troubles the idea that diasporic educational spaces primarily maintain or privilege transnational ties to “home.” I conclude that these educational spaces highlight two related points: first, diasporic educational sites engender creative possibilities for reworking exclusionary discourses; second, they point to the need for a further decentering and decolonization of pedagogy and curriculum in public secondary schools.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2019
Abstract Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism refers to investments in material structures, social ... more Abstract Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism refers to investments in material structures, social norms, and ideological claims of being that work against individual and collective flourishing. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data spanning 2007–2016, this longitudinal study utilizes cruel optimism to explore material and affective investments of middle class Jordanian men into becoming educated, despite their acknowledgement that education delivers limited social mobility. Analyses of school-to-work transitions suggest Jordanian youth is confronting longer periods of transition, rather than indefinitely living in times of compromised possibility. However, a focus on ameliorating transitions and ‘mismatches’ in youth skills and expectations, does not adequately consider how shared understandings of the promise of education change over time, nor how uncertainties of transition become normalized as everyday life. Through participants’ life trajectories, this article examines youth modes of improvisation when ‘transitions’ persist indeterminately, and sanctioned means of future-building fail to deliver normative ideals of the present.
Curriculum Inquiry, 2017
ABSTRACT This article utilizes the idea of hospitality to explore how educative practices contrib... more ABSTRACT This article utilizes the idea of hospitality to explore how educative practices contribute to the making of citizens at Light Falls High School (LHS), a suburban American secondary school that professes a strong commitment to racial equity and global awareness. The data are derived from an ethnographic case study which took place in 2013–2014. I primarily draw upon the classroom experiences and narratives of transnational youth – those with social lives, cultural practices, and notions of self that are not bounded by one nation – and several educators to tell the story of hospitality at LHS. Three techniques emerged by which conditional hospitality shaped the possibilities of welcome and recognition of transnational students – questioning attachment, conditioning speech, and conditioning space – and these in turn constitute normative thresholds that fix these students in difference, delimit their belonging, and constrain their possibilities of membership. The gift of welcome meant to make non-normative students feel welcome often comes with caveats that uphold narratives of benevolence and superiority of the United States as an exceptional nation, affirm the notion of White indigeneity, and allow for mitigation in acknowledging structural racism.
Gender and Education, 2015
Journal on Education in Emergencies, 2020
Though "emergency" is a key concept in the field of education in emergencies, scholars ... more Though "emergency" is a key concept in the field of education in emergencies, scholars and practitioners have long been ambivalent about this term and what conditions it can refer to. In this article, drawing from the work of anthropologist Janet Roitman, I critically revisit the concepts of emergency and crisis, and propose that understanding emergency primarily as a moment of shock or the unexpected event obscures how seemingly normal conditions may produce their own impasses. Rather than being characterized by a consensus of meaning, crises entail narrative constructions that create new temporalities and frame certain questions and responses as possible, others as not. In this article, I juxtapose two narrative constructions of crisis in popular culture to explore how narrative constructions of the war on drugs can produce jarringly different accounts of the crises they are said to represent. I suggest that explicitly attending to the underlying politics of crisis narra...
Si bien "emergencia" es un concepto clave en el campo de la educación en emergencias (E... more Si bien "emergencia" es un concepto clave en el campo de la educación en emergencias (EeE), los académicos y especialistas han sido ambivalentes con respecto a este término y las condiciones a las que se refiere. A partir del trabajo de la antropóloga Janet Roitman, en este artículo propongo revisar de forma crítica los conceptos de emergencia y crisis. Asimismo, propongo que entender "emergencia" como si fuese un momento de conmoción o un hecho inesperado oscurece la forma en la que condiciones aparentemente normales pueden producir sus propios impases. En lugar de caracterizarse por un consenso de significado, las crisis implican construcciones narrativas que crean nuevas temporalidades, al mismo tiempo que enmarcan solo ciertas preguntas y respuestas como posibles. En este artículo yuxtapongo dos construcciones narrativas de crisis en la cultura popular para explorar cómo las construcciones narrativas sobre la guerra contra las drogas pueden producir dos relat...
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Journal of Gender Studies
Journal of Educational Administration
Comparative Education Review
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Papers by Roozbeh Shirazi
characterized by a consensus of meaning, crises entail narrative constructions that create new temporalities and frame certain questions and responses as possible, others as not. In this article, I juxtapose two narrative constructions of crisis in popular culture to explore how narrative constructions of the war on drugs can produce jarringly different accounts of the crises they are said to represent. I suggest that explicitly attending to the underlying politics of crisis narration—though possibly complicating emergency response—is vital to naming and resolving possible ethical
blind spots and impasses in the field of education in emergencies.
Findings – Though the school and district have made different investments in strengthening equity and diversity at the school, transnational and minoritized Muslim students report a school climate that is characterized by exclusion and racialized surveillance. The principal’s decision to suspend the MSA was characterized by a narrow understanding of the purpose of the group and the identities of the student members. The decision to suspend the MSA, however, produced conditions centering the agentive potential of marginalized and minoritized students.
Originality/value – This paper opens up the tensions challenges of incorporating student voice into educational decision making. Notably, it highlights important possibilities for political action students when their voices cannot or will not be heard by those who make decisions on their behalf.