Previous Senior Fellows and Visiting Professors

Dr Giovanna Modé Magalhães has been working for more than 15 years with education policies and human rights at national, regional and international levels, at both academic institutions and civil society organizations. She holds a Master (2010) and PhD (2019) in Sociology of Education by the School of Education of the University of São Paulo, in the research programme “Education and Social Sciences: Inequalities and Diversity”. Her PhD thesis, “Walls and passages: immigration, asylum and mobilities in the educational debate, fragments from global to local contexts” was awarded by Cátedra Sergio Vieira de Mello and UNHCR Office in Brazil. Her research topics include education, human rights and international migration, with several articles, reports and books published.

Over the last decade, she has served as the Head of Policy of the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE, for its acronym in Spanish). As such, she participated in the civil society advocacy process towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations from 2012 to 2015, and more recently in its follow-up and implementation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Prior to that, she took part in the creation and implementation of the Inclusive Education Regional Observatory, joint initiative of CLADE, ECLAC, OEI, UNESCO and UNICEF, that works in the promotion of peace education and the overcoming of violence and discriminations in educational systems.

Recent initiatives include also the research project Strategies to prevent sexual and gender-based violence and foster equity in rural schools in Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti (CLADE, KIX LAC), as well as the consultancy Strategies of schools reopening in Latin American and the Caribbean (UNICEF), and the study Venezuelan children to pre primary schools in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador (Plan International). She is part of the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (since 2009), as well as a member of the Center for African, Asian and Latin American Studies at the University of Lisbon (since 2017), where she acted as visiting researcher (2017).

Dr Giovanna Modé Magalhães held the Senior Fellowship of the Georg Arnhold Program from March to Agust 2023. During her fellowship period, she explored particularly the presence and representation of migrant and refugee populations in school curricula and textbooks within two case studies, Colombia and El Salvador. Her project aimed to understand current narratives and the way they contribute to or challenge peace education.

Dr. Mneesha Gellman is associate professor of political science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. She is the author ofIndigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States(University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2023),Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador(Routledge 2017), as well as numerous scholarly articles on methodology, democracy, and education politics issues in journals such asPS: Political Science and Politics, the British Journal of Sociology of Education, andLatin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Gellman is the founder and director of theEmerson Prison Initiative,which bring college access to incarcerated people in Massachusetts. She also serves as anexpert witnessin asylum cases in United States immigration courts. She was aFulbright U.S. Scholarin Mexico in 2020, and a2021-22 IIE Centennial Fellow.

GEORG ARNHOLD SENIOR FELLOWSHIP 2022

Dr. Gellman’s time as Senior Fellow at the Georg Arnhold Program was spent working on the projectTransborder Youth: The Politics of Identity, Colonialism, and Belonging. This project explores the ways that educational curricula intersect with experiences of marginalization and identity for public school youth. Both Mexico and the United States have struggled to address indigeneity and migration in ways that allow for the cultural integrity of both Indigenous people and migrants. Curricular materials often present one dominant frame of content that reduces the complexity of multifaceted identities, instead relying on assimilation as part of nation-building projects.

Students from historically and contemporarily marginalized backgrounds bring experiences of intergenerational trauma from migration, state policies of forced assimilation, and genocide. This trauma often plays out in the formal education sectors, where history and identity are presented from statist perspectives that can retraumatize through problematic curricula. At the same time, culturally relevant curricula is proving to be a significant tool in facilitating a meaningful sense of youth belonging for students from many minority demographics. Yet schools are resistant to curricular changes and protest them in both overt and covert ways. District curricular committee meetings, protests by parents of students, and individual classrooms with teachers who may or may not be interested in decolonizing their approach to educational material are all sites where the politics of identity in education play out.

With increasing rates of migration combined with accelerated rates of cultural and economic globalization, what are the challenges for education policy and curricula as it pertains to identity validation for youth from traditionally marginalized backgrounds? Transborder Youth explores the relationship between decolonization and educational curricula in public secondary schools in Oaxaca, Mexico and far Northern California. The project includes analysis of ethnographic data, including qualitative interviews and focus groups regarding student experiences of inclusion and exclusion, survey data on school and community climates, and curricular analyses that document spaces of resistance to assimilation and youth resilience. Overall, the project seeks to promote best practices in facilitating positive youth identity formation for students from all backgrounds through historically accurate and culturally relevant curriculum. Doing so contributes to stronger democracies and peaceful coexistence.

Dr. Sara Clarke-Habibi has worked in the field of peacebuilding through education for 20 years as a practitioner, researcher, curriculum developer and trainer. Her research and teaching focus on educational intersections with violent conflict and displacement, historical trauma and psychosocial healing, transitional justice and post-conflict reconstruction, critical peacebuilding and intergroup reconciliation. Dr. Clarke-Habibi led the first post-war peace education program in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 2000s, working intensively with 6000 students and 400 teachers on psychosocial recovery, intercommunity peacebuilding and reconciliation using whole-school, cross-curricular approaches. She has since specialised in secondary school education and teacher training in the Western Balkans and is the author of three substantive teaching manuals in this field, as well as several scientific articles, chapters and technical reports. Beyond the Balkans, Dr. Clarke-Habibi has supported peacebuilding projects and practitioners in another 20 countries across the Americas, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia in collaboration with numerous NGOs and universities.

She earned an MPhil (2012) and PhD(2017) in Education at the University of Cambridge, an MA in Conflict Resolution (2002) from Landegg International University, and a BA in Ethics, Society and Law (1999) from the University of Toronto.She currently works as an educational consultant for UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA and RYCO in the Western Balkans, developing training materials and methodologies aimed at strengthening teacher and youth competences for intercultural dialogue, peacebuilding and dealing with the past. She is also a researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where she analyses educational provision for migrant and refugee populations.

Dr Sara Clarke-Habibi was Georg Arnhold Senior Fellow from March to August 2021. Her research under the title“Peacing together a conflicted society: Educational values, voices and practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina” traced shifts in education for peace practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) over a 20-year period.

Dr Markus Schultze-Kraft is a political scientist with broad experience in cross-disciplinary research, policy analysis and university teaching in the global South (International Crisis Group; Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex; Universidad Icesi). His research, teaching and advisory work focuses on peace and state-building; peace education; security and security management; violent conflict (resolution); inclusive development; organised crime and crimilegality; hybrid political orders; and political settlements in Latin America, West Africa and the Western Balkans. He holds an MA (Diplom) in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin and was awarded an MPhil in Latin American Studies and a DPhil in Politics bythe Oxford University (St Antony’s College).

Dr Markus Schultz-Kraft was Senior Fellow of the Georg Arnhold Program from January to June 2020. During this time he conducted research into: Education for Sustainable Peace and Crimilegality in Colombia.

Dr Jennifer Riggan was our eight Visiting Professor at the GEI in 2019. She is Associate Professor of International Studies at Arcadia University and also teaches in the University’s International Peace and Conflict Resolution program. She is an educational and political anthropologist whose ethnographic research addresses a variety of issues including nationalism, citizenship, state formation, borders and bordering, militarism, development, humanitarianism and education in Africa.

In 2019 Dr Bassel Akar was the seventh Visiting Professor of the program in Braunschweig. He is Associate Professor of Education and Director of the Center for Applied Research in Education at Notre Dame University – Louaize, Lebanon. His research focuses on learning and teaching for active citizenship in the context of Lebanon and other sites affected by armed conflict.

Dr Harmat was in 2018 Georg Arnhold Professor at the Institute. She is a Senior Gender Advisor for Peace Mediation Processes and Human Rights Organizations and a Lecturer in Conflict Transformation, Peace Education and Gender and Co-Director of the Social Justice and Peace Teacher Training Program at Kibbutzim Teachers College in Tel Aviv, Israel. She teaches at the World Peace Academy (University of Basel), the UN University for Peace, and the College of Arts and Social Sciences in Israel.

Dr Giovanni Scotto was a visiting professor of the Georg Arnhold Program in 2017. He is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Florence, where he served as Director of the BA program in Development and Conflict Management Studies. He currently teaches international conflict transformation, transformative education methods, and mediation. His previous positions include Professor of International Organizations at Syracuse University, Florence and a lectureship in the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University.

Dr Sergey Rumyansev was the fourth visiting professor at GEI in 2015/16. He is co-director of the South Caucasus Open School in Tbilisi (Georgia) and one of the founders of the Centre for Independent Social Research (CISR) in Berlin. From 2003 to 2014, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan in Baku. He also serves as an academic expert for the Heinrich Böll Foundation's fellowship program for young researchers and teachers in social studies and is the coordinator of the independent transnational network for social sciences NOVATOR.

Dr Susan Shepler joined the Institute in 2015 as the third Georg Arnhold Visiting Professor. She is a Professor of International Peace and Conflict Resolution at the School of International Studies at American University in Washington, DC. From 2013 to 2014, she spent a year as a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Centre for Conflict Management and Peace Studies at the University of Jos in Nigeria.

Dr Kenneth Omeje was our second visiting professor in Braunschweig in 2014. He is a professor of international relations and an expert on peacebuilding and security studies in Africa at the United States International University-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. He is Director of Manifold Crown Consulting Services in Bradford, UK, a fellow of the West Africa Institute (WAI) in Praia, Cape Verde and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the UN-sponsored University for Peace (UPEACE) Africa Program in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Dr M. Ayaz Naseem was the first Georg Arnhold Professor with us at the Institute in 2013/2014. Is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia University, Montreal, where he has been teaching since 2004. He is also Graduate Program Director of Educational Studies in the Department of Education at Concordia University. Dr Naseem was also an adjunct lecturer in Defense and Strategic Studies (1987-1994) and a lecturer in International Relations (1987-1994) at Quaid i Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan.