Shenila Khoja-Moolji
DCC Postdoctoral Fellow, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Shenila Khoji-Moolji received her doctorate in Education and additional certification in Feminist Theory from Columbia University in 2016. Her research interests include examining discourses on gender and education, and their entanglement with practices of power. Dr. Khoja-Moolji’s work problematizes the centering of girls’ education and empowerment as a solution to societal problems, especially in relation to Muslim-majority nations. Specifically, she interrogates universalistic notions of girlhood, empowerment, and rights embedded in past and present calls for women’s and girls’ education, and in doing so highlights the raced, gendered, and religioned configurations of citizenship that emerge in and through humanitarian discourses. Dr. Khoja-Moolji has written extensively about the convergence on the figure of the girl in transnational development regimes. She also investigates education policy discourses as they relate to immigrants in the United States and teacher development in the global South. Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Feminist Teacher, Gender and Education, Girlhood Studies, and Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, and in several book chapters. She also pursues an active public scholarship agenda, with opinion pieces and essays appearing in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post. At Penn, Dr. Khoja-Moolji plans to complete her book manuscript, tentatively entitled Gender, Education, and Governmentality: The Making of Educated Female Muslim Subjects in Colonial India and Postcolonial Pakistan (1857-2015).
Working Group Affiliations