Roozbeh Shirazi

I am honored to be nominated for Vice-President of the Comparative and International Education Society—I have spent more than two decades engaging with our field as a student, scholar, and member of our society. CIES has been an important backdrop for this professional journey, and where I have developed into the scholar that I am today. Below I offer a brief historical itinerary of how I have come to the vision I have for CIES.

In 2003, I began graduate studies in comparative and international education at Teachers College, Columbia University, after working as a public-school teacher nearby in New Jersey, where I was increasingly motivated to critically explore how schooling shapes youth political identities. Delving into this relationship was an interest borne of the political moment—my entrance into our field was marked by the rapid restructuring of civil rights and citizenship in the wake of the September 11^th attacks, the racialized surveillance and suppression of political critique on university campuses, as well as the rise of preemptive wars as an international relations paradigm.  Those conditions have not only remained present tense; they have intensified, and inform the research questions I ask, the intellectual partnerships I have built, and the service and leadership opportunities that I seek out. 

When I first joined our society, I did not initially see readily identifiable venues that aligned with my scholarship.  And yet, CIES has transformed greatly since I attended my first meeting in 2009.  In the time since, I have strived to build intellectual community and inquiry spaces where they may not have existed in our society:

• co-organizing (with Zeena Zakharia) a Presidential Session on the Arab Uprisings in 2010;
• co-chairing the Middle East SIG for two terms from 2012-2015;
• serving on the SIG Oversight Committee from 2016-2019;
• participating and co-organizing the 2017 Trump Teach-in in Atlanta;
• serving as a founding member of the 21^st Century Socialism and Education Track in 2019 and developing panels to advance conversations on militarism and empire
• providing ad hoc support to the Middle East SIG leadership to develop programming and public engagement with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
• actively participating in 17 annual meetings and several regional meetings as presenter, panel and workshop organizer, discussant, and as a reviewer.

Over the years, these activities have taught me not only the importance of collective action and planning, they have also played a small part in the organic expansion of our field in new and necessary directions. My involvement in CIES have also instilled in me a vision for the future of our society, as we move and adapt to challenges of the current political moment.  If elected, I would prioritize the following areas:

1. Protecting academic freedom and critical inquiry amid increasing political repression
2. Encourage new forms of knowledge production and expansive understandings of comparative and international education, notably through media and visual representations
3. Deepen and enhance spaces for multidisciplinary collaboration, across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to meet the increasingly interconnected challenges of educating amid climate change, racialized nationalism, and the deterioration of civil liberties

 As Vice-President, my mission would be to advance these commitments and expand CIES as a space for articulating and advancing greater justice and dignity across the world through education.