Dr. Ayesha Khurshid is an Associate Professor of International and Multicultural Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Florida State University. She received her doctorate in Education with specializations in International and Comparative Education and Gender and Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary and ethnographic research focuses on international development and educational policymaking and implementation, globalization and transnationalism, and gender and education. Dr. Khurshid’s work approaches international education as a site that produces gendered citizenship in different national and cultural contexts. She also studies how global policies to educate and empower women in developing and Muslim countries are translated into local contexts.

Dr. Khurshid is currently working on a research project that examines how women teachers, girl students, and community members from rural contexts in Pakistan receive, translate, and contest global policies and discourses of women’s education, gender empowerment, and modernity. She particularly focuses on how gender, class, and Islam intersect to shape the identities of the women teachers and girls’ students as educated and modern Muslim women. Her second project focuses on a diaspora-led transnational women’s education project to study how diaspora groups, rather than national governments or international development agencies, develop and implement projects to support education in their home countries. The findings show how in such cases international education becomes a hybrid transnational process that connects communities living in different parts of the world, and in the process also produces new forms of local/global citizenship. Dr. Khurshid is also developing a new research project to study how media discourses in North America construct and mobilize the narrative of gender empowerment through women’s education for Muslim countries. This project examines how these media narratives, which influence popular perceptions as well as international education policymaking and implementation, present Islam and local culture in relation to education for Muslim women.

Dr. Khurshid’s work on international education and gendered citizenship, international development, Islam, and women’s education, international educational reforms and local cultural practices, and multicultural education in international contexts has appeared in the form of book chapters and journal articles in Gender & Society, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Infant and Child Development. She teaches International Development Education, Anthropology of Education, Qualitative Research Methods in Education, and Multicultural Education.