Dr. Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher is a Senior Lecturer in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where she is also the Co-Director of the International Educational Development Program. A School Psychologist by training, she earned her doctorate in International Educational Development with a specialization in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research has focused on the socialization, academic engagement, and civic commitments of migrant children and youth. Her practitioner work has been around teacher education, curriculum development and school climate issues (particularly related to bias-based bullying and Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism) in the United States and abroad through local and international nongovernmental organizations, USAID, and UNESCO. Ghaffar-Kucher is a coeditor of the award-winning volume Refugees, Immigrants and Education in the Global South: Lives in Motion (2013; Routledge), the winner of the 2013 Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award of the Comparative and International Education Society. Her work has been published in the American Education Research Journal; Harvard Educational Review; International Journal of Intercultural Relations; Race, Ethnicity & Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; and The Urban Review. She serves on the board of directors for the Comparative and International Educational Society and the Pennsylvania Council of International Education, and was an advisory board member for MTV's Look Different Campaign. Her latest project (with Thea Abu el-Haj) is a national study that examines the civic engagement of youth from Muslim immigrant communities in the US and is sponsored by the Spencer Foundation.
- Ghaffar-Kucher, A. (2019). Uncertain prospects and ambiguous futures: The challenges & opportunities of educating forced migrants. Background paper for 2019 GEM Report on Migration. UNESCO IIEP.
- Ghaffar-Kucher, A., & El-Haj, T. R. A. (2018). Exit East? The fight against US anti-Muslim racism. The Assembly: A Journal for Public Scholarship on Education, 1(1),7.
- Bartlett, L., Mendenhall, M., & Ghaffar-Kucher, A.(2017). Culture in acculturation: Refugee youth’s schooling experiences in international schools in New York City. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 60, 109–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2017.04.005
- Mendenhall, M., Bartlett, L., & Ghaffar-Kucher, A. (2017). “If you need help, they are always there for us”: Education for refugees in an international high school in NYC. The Urban Review, 49(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-016-0379-4
- Bajaj, M., Ghaffar-Kucher, A., & Desai, K. (2016). Brown bodies and xenophobic bullying in US schools: Critical analysis and strategies for action. Harvard Educational Review, 86(4), 481–505. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-86.4.481
- Ghaffar-Kucher, A. (2015). Writing culture; inscribing lives: A reflective treatise on the burden of representation in native research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(10), 1186–1202. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2014.974720
- Ghaffar-Kucher, A. (2015). “Narrow-minded and oppressive” or a “superior culture”? Implications of divergent representations of Islam for Pakistani-American youth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(2), 202–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2014.889111
- Hantzopoulos, M., Zakharia, Z., Shirazi, R., Bajaj, M., & Ghaffar-Kucher, A. (2015). Re-thinking the region: New approaches to 9-12 US curriculum on MENA. Social Studies Research and Practice.
- Ghaffar-Kucher, A. (2012). The religification of Pakistani-American youth. American Educational Research Journal, 49(1), 30–52. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831211414858
Books
- Bartlett, L., & Ghaffar-Kucher A. (Eds.). (2013). Immigrants, refugees, and education in the global south: Lives in motion. Routledge..
Select Curricula
- Hantzopoulos, M., Bajaj, M., Ghaffar-Kucher, A., Shirazi, R., & Zakharia, Z. (2014). Re-thinking the region: New approaches to 9-12 US curriculum on the Middle East and North Africa.Social Science Research Council and the British Council.