Hot off the Press: Where do we go from here? The Afghan Refugee Crisis

Dr. Ashley E. Cureton is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work and School of Education at the University of Michigan. She also serves as a faculty affiliate in the Center for Equitable Family & Community Well-Being. Dr. Cureton explores the educational and mental health needs and outcomes of refugee and migrant children and youth and their families. She seeks to understand how displacement and exploitation impact their overall academic and social development, sense of belonging and cultural identity. Her research builds on over a decade of research and practice focusing on child and adolescent development among migrant and refugee populations and other marginalized groups in global contexts like South Africa, Morocco, Peru and Ecuador, to name a few.

Dr. Dana Burde is an associate professor and director of the International Education Program at New York University's Steinhardt School, affiliated faculty at NYU's Wilf Family Department of Politics, at NYU Abu Dhabi, and an affiliate of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. She is an associate professor at the Center for Economic Research and Policy (CERP) in Lahore, Pakistan. Dr. Burde is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal on Education in Emergencies.

Dr. Burde's research focuses on the effects of conflict on education, the efforts of humanitarian organizations to mitigate these effects, and the relationship between education and political violence or peace.

Dr. Odessa Gonzalez Benson is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Her areas of research are: refugee resettlement, refugee/migrant-led organizations, participatory approaches to urban governance and social services with refugees, state-civil society relations, critical policy studies. Dr. Gonzalez Benson pursues interdisciplinary work integrating social welfare and community perspectives with refugee studies and urban studies, particularly within the context of "new refugee destinations."

Dr. Sara Kamali is the author of Homegrown Hate: Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists Are Waging War against the United States (University of California Press, 2021) and founder of Syntax & Semantics, a full-service editing agency for writers of all levels from initial idea to publication. She is a scholar of White nationalism, militant Islamism, and systemic inequities. Her writings and activism address how interlocking institutions of power oppress the many while maintaining systems of privilege for a select few. Dr. Kamali also calls for changing the current counterterrorism paradigm in the United States to one based on what she defines as “holistic justice” in order to effectively counter White nationalism and militant Islamism, both transnational terror threats, by redressing systemic racism and interlocking inequities, contextualizing history to cultivate empathy and understanding, and networking across marginalized identities for solidarity as part of an anti-oppression approach.

Dr. Ana Paula Pimentel Walker is an assistant professor in urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She investigates how disenfranchised communities engage with urban governance and evaluates the significance of participatory institutions in planning socially and environmentally just cities. Dr. Pimentel Walker’s research goal is to identify institutional designs and participatory planning practices that have the potential to produce socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable cities.