Professional Biography
Dr. Graham studies techno-cultural relations in education. She received her doctorate in anthropology and education from Columbia University in 2014. Following her studies, in 2015, she was a visiting postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle Germany. From 2009 to 2010, she was a research fellow at the Columbia University Middle East Research Center in Amman, Jordan, and in 2013 was affiliated with the Freedom of Expression project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
Her ethnographic work is situated at the confluence of education, technology, and social change in the urban U.S. and MENA region. She has conducted fieldwork and taught humanities and social science courses at universities in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Before coming to Penn GSE, Dr. Graham taught graduate courses in urban education and technology, culture, and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. At GSE, she teaches in the Education, Culture, and Society program and the International Educational Development program. She also co-facilitates the yearlong ECS Master’s Seminar, in which she leads the Community Action and Social Change concentration. Dr. Graham has guided GSE students in the design and completion of innovative, publicly accessible capstone projects, including online portfolios.
Dr. Graham’s current research projects investigate ideations of identity, interdependence, and freedom in educational spaces (online and offline) to get a sense of how human perceptions of self, articulations of companionship, and ideations of belonging influence the design of inclusive classrooms and urban spaces. Overarching questions about gender, power, and the value of embodied knowledge frame her interests in expanding notions of kinship and democracy in relation to emerging conceptions of multispecies politics and “multispecies cities.” Her research looks at both historical and contemporary constructions of gendered, racialized, and marginalized bodies vis-à-vis the state and in relation to evolving technological and environmental conditions.
Dr. Graham’s work explores the complexity of relationships and interactions beyond the human that frame our everyday lives. For the past 20 years, she has conducted ethnographic research in schools and universities, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. Her work examines transformation in education policy and practice in response to globalization, political conflict, displacement, technological innovation, and climate change. Her approach to cultural anthropology challenges anthropocentric perspectives and seeks to validate and include the multiple ways of knowing and being with nonhuman animals and machines that shape the contours of everyday human life, especially in urban contexts.
