EDUCATION IN CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES
Special Interest Group, Comparative and International Education Society
ECE SIG 2024 Paper Award Winner
Darren Rabinowitz
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Darren Rabinowitz is a doctoral candidate (PhD) in International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia. His research focuses on three areas: Climate Change, Sustainable Peace, and Social Movements. Darren's current research explores how education can curtail human behaviors that contribute to the climate crisis and, in turn, support countries' sustainable development efforts toward greener economies, political structures, and societies. His research aims to uncover how education discourses are globally diffused and how they become embedded within the state. Through his research, he unveils how students make sense of global discourses and how they inform their decisions and futures. Darren is a research associate at the Teachers College Center for Sustainable Futures and previously served as a JDC Entwine Fellow in Rwanda in 2017. He holds an M.A. in International Education Development from Teachers College, Columbia University, with a specialization in Peace and Human Rights, and a B.A. from American University in Interdisciplinary Studies.
ECE SIG 2023 Paper Award Winner
Daniel Shephard
Daniel Shephard is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative and International Education with a specialization in Sociology at Teachers College, Columbia University. His current research focuses on how school structures and social networks influence students’ social and academic trajectories within contexts of large-scale forced displacement. His dissertation investigates how the structures of schools hosting refugee students shape interpersonal networks and how those structures and networks influence academic outcomes and social cohesion among both local and displaced students in Jordan. In addition to his dissertation research, Daniel has been involved with educational research projects in 30 countries and has published first-author articles in Compare, Educational Researcher, Children and Youth Services Review, and the International Journal of Social Welfare, and Governance.
ECE SIG 2022 Paper Award Winner
Ruchi Saini
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Ruchi Saini is a doctoral candidate in the International Education Policy Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include gender-based violence (GBV) in South Asia and decolonizing feminist research in conflict-affected contexts. In her current research project, Ruchi makes use of a decolonial feminist framework to analyse female school teachers’ experiences with care work and online teaching during COVID-19 in India. The study draws attention to the complicated forms of agency and resistance exhibited by female school teachers as they navigate the increased care work at home, as well as, the limitation of the agency. It moves beyond an essentializing image of women from the so-called “global south” as victims and/or rebels to instead highlight the messiness, ambiguities, and contradictions of their experiences within emergency contexts.
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Prior to joining the University of Maryland, Ruchi received her Master’s in Arts (English) from St. Stephen's College at the University of Delhi, and a Master’s in Education from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
ECE SIG 2021 Paper Award Winner
Paula Mantilla-Blanco
Paula Mantilla-Blanco is a doctoral fellow in Comparative and International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include education in contexts of transition, processes of normalization of violence, and the construction and transmission of collective memories of war. Paula’s dissertation research draws on the case of Colombia to examine the use of memory sites as pedagogical tools for teaching about a violent past and educating for peacebuilding. Focusing on sites where memories are simultaneously legitimated and contested, Paula’s research looks beyond formal schooling to explore how students’ understandings of the past inform their views on peace. Prior to joining Teachers College, Paula received an MA in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies from Loyola University Chicago and a BS in Mathematics from the Universidad de los Andes.
ECE SIG 2020 Paper Award Winner
Jo Kelcey
Prior to beginning her PhD, Jo worked for ten years in the field of international education, focused in particular on the provision of education in contexts affected by conflict and forced displacement.
Dr. Kelcey recently defended her doctoral dissertation and will soon graduate from the International Education program at New York University. Her dissertation examines the history of education provided to Palestinian refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA). Through her exploration of education for Palestinian refugees, Jo explores whether and how conventional understandings of education as a public good anchored in the nation-state and its associated concept of citizenship, relate to the challenges experienced by people living in situations of protracted displacement and statelessness. By examining the Palestinian case, she hopes to improve understanding of the possibilities and limitations facing education efforts for protracted refugee populations.
ECE SIG 2019 Paper Award Winner
ECE SIG 2019 Travel Award Winner
Jihae Cha
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Jihae "Jay" Cha is a doctoral fellow at the International and Comparative Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Jihae’s research interests examine the intersection of education quality, sense of belonging, and gender, and the ways in which they influence
students' academic motivation and performance in conflict-affected contexts. Jihae's dissertation research explores the schooling experiences of refugee children in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and the different factors that contribute to their school persistence and dropout in displacement. Moving away from deficit discourses that emphasize the vulnerability, passivity, and powerlessness of the displaced populations, Jihae aims to take a balanced approach that explores both challenges and opportunities that exist in refugee education.
Jihae received her M.A. in International Educational Development from Teachers College with a concentration in International Humanitarian Issues and a B.A. in International Studies from Ewha Womans University.
Seun B. Adebayo
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Seun is a PhD Researcher at the School of Education, National University of Ireland Galway. He holds a BSc (Hons.) degree in Political Science from the University of Lagos and an Erasmus Mundus Joint MA degree in Education Policies for Global Development (GLOBED) from the Autonomous University of
Barcelona in partnership with University of Oslo, University of Amsterdam and University of Malta. Seun is a PhD Researcher at the School of Education, National University of Ireland Galway. He holds a BSc (Hons.) degree in Political Science from the University of Lagos and an Erasmus Mundus Joint MA degree in Education Policies for Global Development (GLOBED) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in partnership with University of Oslo, University of Amsterdam and University of Malta.
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