In this article, Thea Renda Abu El-Haj draws on qualitative research conducted with Palestinian American high school students to explore school as a key site for nation building. By focusing on their teachers’ talk and practice, she examines how U.S. nationalism and national identities are produced through everyday racialized and gendered discourses and practices inside one school. She argues that this nation building is deeply entwined with the cultural logic that undergirds U.S. imperial ambitions in relation to the current “war on terror” and explores how productions of everyday nationalism and national belonging define an “American” identity in opposition to cultural and political traits and values assumed to characterize Islam. Ultimately, Abu El-Haj demonstrates how complex discourses about the United States engender a view of education as alternately a liberating and disciplining force for Arab American youth. She concludes with implications for educating teachers “to better address the complexities of teaching in contemporary contexts of global migration, transnationalism, and the war on terror.”

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Thea Renda Abu El-Haj is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her current research explores new questions about citizenship raised by globalization, transnational migration, and the “War on Terror.” This ethnographic research focuses on how young Arab Americans grapple with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of September 11, 2001. Her publications about this study have appeared in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Harvard Educational Review, and Educational Policy. Her first book, Elusive Justice: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday Practice, offers a critical account of the range of justice claims at play inside real schools, exploring several different, important dimensions of educational equity that are often ignored in contemporary educational policy debates.