Teaching September 11 at 25

Inside a fifth-floor classroom at 3440 Market Street, 40 students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered earlier this spring not simply to remember September 11, 2001, but to examine the world it created.

The event was organized by Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, advanced senior lecturer at Penn GSE and director of the International Educational Development program, in collaboration with the departments of History and Asian American Studies, the Middle East Center, and the South Asia Center.  Titled, “September 11 at 25: A Teach-In on an Unfinished Aftermath,”  it brought together Ghaffar-Kucher, Zainab Saleh, associate professor of anthropology at Haverford College, and Alka Pradhan, human rights counsel for the Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions and adjunct professor at Penn Carey Law, for an evening of historical analysis, legal reflection, and community dialogue centered on a single question: What happens when a single day reshapes the world for decades?

Timed ahead of the coming 25th anniversary of September 11, the event invited participants to move beyond the familiar narratives of that morning and grapple instead with what followed: the expansion of surveillance, the securitization of immigration, anti-Muslim racism, U.S.-led wars abroad, and the gradual reshaping of civil liberties at home and around the world.

“It is an important day in the history of this country,” said Ghaffar-Kucher. “But there is a much larger story about what 9/11 brought upon the world and how the world changed. We live in the world that September 11 made.”

For Ghaffar-Kucher, whose scholarship examines structural Islamophobia, migration, citizenship, and youth identity, the event was not a one-off conversation. It grew out of years of work leading Teaching Beyond September 11, a curriculum project housed at Penn GSE and supported by Penn Global that equips educators with critical resources for teaching the history, politics, and cultural aftermath of 9/11. Originally developed for the 20th anniversary, the project includes educational modules tracing major events and policy shifts from 2001 through 2021.

“This has been my work for a very long time,” she said. “The 25th anniversary was a good moment to bring up this history, to get people’s interest.”

The timing also carried another layer of significance. This year marks not only the 25th anniversary of September 11, but also the 250th anniversary of the United States.

“If you make a visual timeline of 250 years and put the last 25 years at the end, you realize it’s ten percent of this country’s history as the United States,” Ghaffar-Kucher said. “I think that is visually striking”

Organized deliberately as a teach-in rather than a lecture, the event emphasized participation over passive listening. Attendees sat at round tables, shared a meal, introduced themselves to one another, worked through historical prompts, and examined a timeline tracing key events from 2001 to 2026, including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, drone warfare, immigration policies, and evolving domestic surveillance measures.

“We wanted the audience to talk to each other,” Ghaffar-Kucher said. “We wanted them asking questions, reflecting, making connections, and thinking critically together.”

The event drew participants from across the university, including Penn Carey Law, the School of Arts & Sciences, Penn Engineering, Penn GSE, and members of the broader Philadelphia community.

For Nada Khan, GED ’26, a recent TESOL program graduate, the event resonated both personally and professionally.

“I first learned about the event through a post shared on the Penn Grad Center’s Instagram,” Khan said. “It felt timely and relevant, especially with how many current issues reflect patterns we’ve seen in the past.”

As an Indian Muslim who grew up in the Middle East and now works with immigrant and refugee communities, Khan said she was particularly drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the panel, which brought together anthropological, legal, and educational perspectives.

“It was sobering to hear about the different ways language and policy are, and have been, used as deliberate tools to shape the way issues are framed and understood,” she said. “Dr. GK’s [Ghaffar-Kucher’s] perspective on hope being a discipline is something I’ll carry with me, especially in conversations shaped by history and ongoing injustice.”

For Khan, the event also underscored the importance of creating educational spaces where difficult histories can be explored collectively.

“I appreciate that we were given space to have conversations with other attendees to help break down these narratives together,” she said. “As someone who works with immigrants and refugees, I think it speaks to the importance of bringing both this kind of grounding and space for dialogue into our classrooms.”

For Kalista Lin, a Wharton undergraduate, the event offered an opportunity to revisit a history that had always felt close to home.

“My ‘Asian American Activism’ professor told our class about the teach-in,” Lin said. “I grew up in New York City, the heart of where the attacks occurred, so I’ve always been very aware of 9/11. But I hadn’t really had many opportunities to learn about its broader repercussions.”

One moment from the panel, she said, fundamentally reshaped how she now thinks about the event.

“There was a quote from one of the speakers that really stayed with me: ‘9/11 didn’t happen on 9/11. It has been long in the making.’ That became foundational to everything we talked about.”

Through discussions of xenophobia, Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and places like Guantánamo Bay, Lin said she began to see September 11 not only as an act of violence, but as a turning point whose consequences continue to shape American society.

“I used to view the incident from a purely educational perspective,” she said. “After hearing about the cultural effects, I gained a new understanding of how detrimental the long-term impact has been. Not just the violence itself, but everything that followed.”

For Ghaffar-Kucher, that kind of reflection is exactly why these conversations matter.

A South Asian Muslim who was living in New York City on September 11 as a graduate student, she said the attacks fundamentally altered the trajectory of both her life and her scholarship.

Over the next two decades, her work with South Asian immigrant communities, Muslim youth, and organizations such as the Sikh Coalition helped her see how the effects of 9/11 extended far beyond any single community.

"It's not just Muslims who have been affected, it's brown people in general—people who are mistaken or assumed to be Muslim," she said. "And some of the surveillance policies that were rolled out against Muslims and other communities of color have now been extended to all communities." 

Following strong audience feedback, organizers are already planning a second teach-in this fall. And when it returns, Ghaffar-Kucher said, the focus will remain the same.

“It isn’t about the day,” she said. “It’s about the world that day created—the aftermath that is still continuing.”