Thea Renda Abu El-Haj
Department of Education, Barnard College
Professor of Education
Department Profile
Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Professor of Education at Barnard College, Columbia University, is an anthropologist of education. Her research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict. For over twenty years, her work has been focused on Palestinian education in the diaspora. Funded by the Spencer Foundation, her current research titled, “Disrupting Dispossession: Teaching Palestine in Exile, 1970-1990” is an oral history project with Palestinian teachers in Lebanon.
She was principal investigator of a US national interview study exploring the civic identities and civic practices of youth from Muslim immigrant communities also funded by the Spencer Foundation. Her second book, 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 and the second intifada. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015, it won the 2016 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award.
Abu El-Haj’s 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. She has published in numerous journal articles including in: Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Comparative Educational Review; Curriculum Inquiry; Educational Policy; Harvard Educational Review; The International Journal of the Sociology of Language; Public Anthropologist; Theory into Practice; and the Review of Research in Education.
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, and the 2024 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education from Division G of the American Educational Research Association. She is also a practicing visual artist.
