Khoja-Moolji, Shenila

Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Biography

Shenila Khoja-Moolji   (Teachers College, Columbia University) 

Shenila Khoja-Moolji is a research fellow and doctoral candidate. She investigates the public pedagogies in and through which the categories of “Muslim women and girls” and “Muslim men” have emerged as sites of concern since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Khoja-Moolji’s recent work has appeared in Gender and Education, Feminist Teacher, and Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education. She holds an MA in theological studies, with focuses on Islamic studies and gender, from Harvard Divinity School.  

Abstract

Converging on the Girl: An investigation into the social production of girls’ education as a hegemonic ideology

There seems to be a global consensus that girls’ education is a commonsensical solution to issues as wide-ranging as poverty, fertility, human trafficking, and terrorism, in the global south. In this presentation, I inquire into how this common sense about girls’ education is produced and sustained. I examine how two radically specific happenings–the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan in 2012 and the kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria, in 2013–were transformed into “events” of international concern, and how girls’ education has come to be proposed as the solution. In doing so, I highlight the histories and social and political realities that the common sense around girls’ education conceals as well as its implications for the wellbeing of populations in the global south