Nadia Durrani
Biographic Data
| ID | 196719 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nadia Durrani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nadia |
| FAMILY NAME | Durrani |
| SIGNATURE | DURRANI N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Nazarbayev University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2989-6851 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Feminism Under Capture: Power, Voice, and the Reconstitution of Feminist Futures
What happens to feminism when it stops challenging power and starts circulating within it? As feminist language enters government agendas, global indicators, and market strategy, it becomes harder to tell whether feminism is transforming those systems or being absorbed by them. This editorial argues that the two are not sequential. Across contributions from Central Asia and beyond, we show feminist voice, agency, and solidarity being produced and…
Exploring rural and small-town students’ pathways to STEM and factors related to their STEM engagement
This study extends Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory to examine how interacting social and institutional contexts shape rural students’ engagement with STEM in Kazakhstan, a country experiencing widening rural-urban disparities. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 23 rural and small-town students enrolled in STEM-related university programmes, the analysis explores how micro-, meso-, exo-, and macro-level systems converge to shape edu…
Mapping the Field: A Scoping Review of Initial Teacher Education Research in Central Asia
This study maps the landscape of initial teacher education (ITE) research in Central Asia and its positioning within global academic discourse between 2004 and 2024. Drawing on a systematic scoping review of 144 publications conducted using the PRISMA-ScR protocol, it analyses publication trends, methodological approaches and thematic foci. The findings indicate that although Central Asia’s contributions to global ITE discourse remain limited, sc…
The contradictions of refugee inclusion policy in education: Teacher and student agency in Afghan refugee schools during language policy and curriculum transition in Pakistan
STEM teachers’ agency for gender equality in STEM education: A mixed-methods study
Drawing on biological differences, teachers positioned girls as “responsible” and boys as “capable” in STEM. • Few teachers could identify gender bias in textbooks and most were not troubled by it. • Teachers were aware of gendered differentiated education pathways but not their own agency to intervene. • Only a minority of teachers expressed an interest in professional development for gender equality. • Teacher education has not supported teache…
Investigating Trends and Developments in Academic Research and Publications on Gender and STEM: A Bibliometric Analysis
Despite the notable increase in women’s enrollment in education, a significant gender gap persists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This imbalance poses challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. While research on the relationship between gender and STEM has been growing, the scientific mapping of the structure and development of the field is yet to be explored. By analyzing 2…
Amplifying young voices through visual methods: Reflections on using body mapping to capture student experiences during school closure
Intimate Partner Violence and the Culture of Shame in Kazakhstan: Voices of Survivors and Violence Against Women Professionals
This research uses in-depth interviews with 12 professionals and 12 survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) to shed light on the manifestations of IPV in Kazakhstan, where IPV is under-researched. Centered on the culturally specific concept of shame ( uyat), the findings illuminate three themes: the prevalent forms of IPV; the impact of uyat on survivors' attitudes and responses to IPV; and survivors' interactions with law enforcement and pr…
Higher Education Leadership Agency in Mainstreaming Gender Equality: Insights From Universities in Kazakhstan
This qualitative study explores the perspectives of senior leadership on gender equality within higher education institutions (HEIs) in Kazakhstan, addressing a gap in the literature on the agency of senior leaders in mainstreaming gender equality in post‐Soviet contexts. Kazakhstan is a significant case due to its high ranking on gender indicators in Central Asia and its unique blend of modernization and traditional gender discourses. We intervi…
Gender and secondary school students’ engagement in STEM subjects: A qualitative study
School Leaders’ Well-Being during Times of Crisis: Insights from a Quantitative Study in Kazakhstan
Amidst increasing global pressures on school leaders, particularly during crises when unforeseen situations necessitate prompt and decisive action from them, understanding the multifaceted dimensions of their well-being is essential for ensuring effective leadership and maintaining educational quality. This study examines the well-being of school leaders during crises by analysing survey responses from 1299 school leaders in Kazakhstan. Employing…
The Evolution of English Medium Instruction Research in Higher Education: A Bibliometric Study
The expansion of English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has generated significant scholarly interest, resulting in an increasing body of research across different contexts. This bibliometric study examines 1522 publications in the Scopus database to explore the intellectual, conceptual, and social structure of the EMI literature in higher education. Findings revealed substantial growth in publications and citations between 1974 and …
Navigating Homeschooling, Parenting, and Work During an Educational Emergency: Insights from Kazakhstan
Emergencies disrupt education service delivery; recent global political developments, environmental disasters, and the emergence of new diseases underscore the need for governments and education systems to learn from past crises to better prepare for future challenges. This qualitative study captures the perspectives of Kazakhstani parents as they navigated the difficulties posed by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic and school closures. Intervi…
Lessons Learned from the Experiences of Domestic Violence Service Providers in Times of Crisis: Insights from a Central Asian Country
Domestic violence is a widespread problem in both stable and crisis contexts. During crisis-driven periods, such as environmental, economic, political, and health emergencies, existing gender inequalities are exacerbated, and the risks of violence against women (VAW) are amplified. This qualitative study explores the experiences of professionals working in VAW organisations in a Central Asian country during the COVID-19 pandemic. By interviewing …
The political economy of education in Central Asia: Exploring the fault lines of social cohesion
This scoping review examines the political economy analysis of education in four Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. By analysing the intersections of politics, economy, society and education policy, the study aims to understand the impact of post-Soviet education reforms on social justice and cohesion. The findings reveal that despite commitments to building peaceful and inclusive societies, the education s…
Thirty years of gender mainstreaming: Evolution, development, and future research agenda through a bibliometric approach
While gender mainstreaming (GM) is globally recognized as a key strategy for realizing gender equality and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the evolution and development of GM research have yet to be analyzed. This article fills this gap in knowledge by undertaking a bibliometric analysis of the GM literature based on 1590 documents extracted from two of the most extensive databases, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). Our findings revea…
Leading Schools During a Global Crisis: Kazakhstani School Leaders' Perspectives and Practices
This paper comprehensively examines how school leaders in Kazakhstan managed schools during the COVID-19 school closures. An online survey was conducted with 1,298 school leaders, representing 17.5% of all Kazakhstani schools. Anchored in the concept of crisis leadership, the instrument measured school leaders' views regarding teachers' digital competence, their support toward teachers in digital pedagogy, as well as their practices in communicat…
Education in Emergencies: Mapping the Global Education Research Landscape in the Context of the Covid-19 Crisis
This study uses an education in emergencies (EiE) lens and a scientometric approach to examine the educational research landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing 95,628 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 2020 to February 2023. It employed descriptive and network approaches to map growth trajectory, productivity, social structure, conceptual structure, and research methodologies used in the retrieved…
Evolution of gender research in the social sciences in post-Soviet countries: A bibliometric analysis
While interest in mapping the patterns of publication and research in post-Soviet countries has been growing steadily, there is a gap in knowledge about how gender is featured in post-Soviet research and publications. Using a descriptive bibliometric approach and metadata extracted from 2822 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database for 1993–2021, this study seeks to understand the evolution of gender research in post-So…
Conducting Focus Groups in Multicultural Educational Contexts: Lessons Learned and Methodological Insights
What happens when focus groups are conducted in challenging situations across languages, cultures, and educational settings? What adjustments might need to be made? How can adaptations be made while still maintaining the integrity of the research? Drawing on a multi-year study of gender and schooling in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, this article brings together researcher data from (1) informal discussion occurring after each focus group between the re…
Archaeology: A Brief Introduction
Settlement and Landscape
The fearful khan and the delightful beauties’: The construction of gender in secondary school textbooks in Kazakhstan
This paper analyses how secondary school textbooks enact gender in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. As a ‘gender paradox’, with universal literacy and yet a higher representation of women at the tertiary level co-existing with multi-sectoral gaps at the expense of women, Kazakhstan offers an interesting context to empirically investigate the taken for granted relationship between education, gender equality and sustainable development. Poststructuralist di…
The dawn of everything: A new history
This 526-page discourse is a reasoned argument for rejecting the notion of steady progress in the human past that challenges our assumptions about the origins of many aspects of modern human behavior, including farming, property, cities, democracy, and slavery. The authors take an anarchic position. They conclude that since we have organized ourselves in many ways in the past, so there are other ways of organizing ourselves beyond the current dom…
National identities and the external other in Muslim majority contexts: Youth narratives in Pakistan and Senegal
This paper focuses on youth’s constructions of their national identities in two contrasting Muslim-majority contexts – Senegal and Pakistan – with very different histories of nation-state formation and post-independence trajectories. Drawing on case study research, we take up the historical specificities of their respective state formations and emergence as independent nations from their colonial past. After describing our theoretical frameworks …
Curriculum and national identity: Exploring the links between religion and nation in Pakistan
This paper investigates the relationship between schooling and conflict in Pakistan using an identity-construction lens. Drawing on data from curriculum documents, student responses to classroom activities, and single-sex student focus groups, it explores how students in four state primary schools in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan, use curricula and school experiences to make sense of themselves as Pakistani. The findings sugge…
Schooling the ‘other’: The representation of gender and national identities in Pakistani curriculum texts
Until relatively recently, educational research in developing countries has focused mainly on issues of access for addressing gender inequalities in education. This paper argues that challenging patriarchal relations in schooling and education requires moving beyond access to understanding the ways the curriculum acts as a set of discursive practices which position girls and boys unequally and differently constitute them as gendered and nationali…
The fearful khan and the delightful beauties’: The construction of gender in secondary school textbooks in Kazakhstan
This paper analyses how secondary school textbooks enact gender in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. As a ‘gender paradox’, with universal literacy and yet a higher representation of women at the tertiary level co-existing with multi-sectoral gaps at the expense of women, Kazakhstan offers an interesting context to empirically investigate the taken for granted relationship between education, gender equality and sustainable development. Poststructuralist di…
Dynamics of gender justice, conflict and social cohesion: Analysing educational reforms in Pakistan
This paper analyses the role of national level reforms in the school curriculum and initial teacher education in gender justice in conflict-affected Pakistan, using a multidisciplinary framework applied to multiple data sets from selected teacher education institutions in Sindh. The school curriculum texts analysed potentially perpetuate gender injustice and foster conflict. While teacher education reforms offer the potential for transformative g…
Teachers as agents of peace? Exploring teacher agency in social cohesion in Pakistan
This paper studies an under-researched area – teachers’ role in peacebuilding in conflict-affected contexts – through exploring teacher agency for social cohesion in Pakistan. Insights are sought into teachers’ perspectives on the major drivers of conflict in society and the role of education and teachers in social cohesion and mitigating inequities in education. A 4Rs framework of redistribution, recognition, representation and reconciliation wa…
The political economy of education in Central Asia: Exploring the fault lines of social cohesion
This scoping review examines the political economy analysis of education in four Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. By analysing the intersections of politics, economy, society and education policy, the study aims to understand the impact of post-Soviet education reforms on social justice and cohesion. The findings reveal that despite commitments to building peaceful and inclusive societies, the education s…
Conducting Focus Groups in Multicultural Educational Contexts: Lessons Learned and Methodological Insights
What happens when focus groups are conducted in challenging situations across languages, cultures, and educational settings? What adjustments might need to be made? How can adaptations be made while still maintaining the integrity of the research? Drawing on a multi-year study of gender and schooling in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, this article brings together researcher data from (1) informal discussion occurring after each focus group between the re…
Pluralising Islam: Doing Muslim identities differently
This paper challenges the stereotypical homogenisation of Islam often circulated in global discourses. We do this by focusing on the different ways youth across four national case studies constructed their religious identities. The analysis is informed by our understanding that local, national and global discourses are significant to the interpellation of subjects and the production of identities. These on-going processes produce plurality and di…
Gender symbolism and the expression of post-colonial national and religious identities
This paper traces the symbolic importance of gender to the assertion of national and religious identities drawing on case study data with youth from Senegal, Pakistan, Nigeria and Lebanon. We start with a brief overview of the theoretical and methodological approach to the research. We then illustrate the gender assumptions within youth identity narratives and the ways these produce masculinist and patriarchal national imaginaries that instantiat…
Understanding agency differently: Female youth's Muslim identities
This paper draws on our recent research into Muslim youth identities to consider theoretical and methodological issues with respect to gender and Muslim women's agency. Western constructions of Muslim women often portray them in essentialised ways as subordinated and without agency. We take up alternative theoretical frameworks that illuminate the limitations of modern understandings of the self and agency, and in particular their problematic ass…
Youth negotiation of citizenship identities in Pakistan: Implications for global citizenship education in conflict-contexts
This study explores young students’ negotiation of their citizenship identities at the intersection of their class, gender, religious and ethnic identifications in the conflict-affected setting of Pakistan. While much of the global literature on global citizenship education (GCE) primarily takes into account the perspectives of middle-class or elite students located in richer economies, the current study is centred on a socio-demographically dive…
Becoming a teacher: Transitions from training to the classroom in the NWFP, Pakistan
Higher Education Leadership Agency in Mainstreaming Gender Equality: Insights From Universities in Kazakhstan
This qualitative study explores the perspectives of senior leadership on gender equality within higher education institutions (HEIs) in Kazakhstan, addressing a gap in the literature on the agency of senior leaders in mainstreaming gender equality in post‐Soviet contexts. Kazakhstan is a significant case due to its high ranking on gender indicators in Central Asia and its unique blend of modernization and traditional gender discourses. We intervi…
Thirty years of gender mainstreaming: Evolution, development, and future research agenda through a bibliometric approach
While gender mainstreaming (GM) is globally recognized as a key strategy for realizing gender equality and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the evolution and development of GM research have yet to be analyzed. This article fills this gap in knowledge by undertaking a bibliometric analysis of the GM literature based on 1590 documents extracted from two of the most extensive databases, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). Our findings revea…
Education in Emergencies: Mapping the Global Education Research Landscape in the Context of the Covid-19 Crisis
This study uses an education in emergencies (EiE) lens and a scientometric approach to examine the educational research landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing 95,628 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 2020 to February 2023. It employed descriptive and network approaches to map growth trajectory, productivity, social structure, conceptual structure, and research methodologies used in the retrieved…
The dawn of everything: A new history
This 526-page discourse is a reasoned argument for rejecting the notion of steady progress in the human past that challenges our assumptions about the origins of many aspects of modern human behavior, including farming, property, cities, democracy, and slavery. The authors take an anarchic position. They conclude that since we have organized ourselves in many ways in the past, so there are other ways of organizing ourselves beyond the current dom…
National identities and the external other in Muslim majority contexts: Youth narratives in Pakistan and Senegal
This paper focuses on youth’s constructions of their national identities in two contrasting Muslim-majority contexts – Senegal and Pakistan – with very different histories of nation-state formation and post-independence trajectories. Drawing on case study research, we take up the historical specificities of their respective state formations and emergence as independent nations from their colonial past. After describing our theoretical frameworks …
Silencing youth sexuality in Senegal: Intersections of medicine and morality
This article reports on recent research funded by international development actors which explored how Senegalese youth acted as ‘active citizens’ and claimed their education and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) rights. Our analysis is framed by a review of contemporary international development discourses that seem to offer fertile possibilities for more plural understandings of sexuality. After describing the research methodology and methods…
The Tihamah Coastal Plain of South-West Arabia in its Regional Context c. 6000 BC – AD 600
The Tihamah plain extends some 500km down the western coast of modern Yemen and about 100km along its southern coast. This publication presents the first long-term culture-history of the Tihamah, through the exploration of socio-economic, cultural and political developments and of the region's relation to the rest of South West Arabia to its east, and to the Horn of Africa lying to its west, across the Red Sea. This research assimilates and analy…
The Tihamah Coastal Plain of South-West Arabia in Its Regional Context, C.6000 BC-Ad 600 (Bar International)
A brief history of archaeology classical times to the twenty-first century: Classical Times to the Twenty-First Century
For introductory courses in Archaeology. This brief text tells the story of how archaeology changed from a romantic adventure into a science. Its vivid narrative combines tales of archaeological discovery with the changing social conditions and theoretical perspectives that helped turn archaeology into a sophisticated discipline. Containing a simple, jargon-free style-and a lifetime of teaching experience-this text writer shares with today's stud…
Schooling the ‘other’: The representation of gender and national identities in Pakistani curriculum texts
Until relatively recently, educational research in developing countries has focused mainly on issues of access for addressing gender inequalities in education. This paper argues that challenging patriarchal relations in schooling and education requires moving beyond access to understanding the ways the curriculum acts as a set of discursive practices which position girls and boys unequally and differently constitute them as gendered and nationali…
Becoming a teacher: Transitions from training to the classroom in the NWFP, Pakistan
Curriculum and national identity: Exploring the links between religion and nation in Pakistan
This paper investigates the relationship between schooling and conflict in Pakistan using an identity-construction lens. Drawing on data from curriculum documents, student responses to classroom activities, and single-sex student focus groups, it explores how students in four state primary schools in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan, use curricula and school experiences to make sense of themselves as Pakistani. The findings sugge…
Early Chinese Civilization
The Origins of Chinese Civilization By 4000 b.c., agriculture had taken such hold in China that population densities rose throughout the country (Liu, 2004; Stark, 2006). The farmers took more and more land into cultivation until there was little new acreage available for planting. Some pollen analyses from northern villages show how the trees that once surrounded many settlements were felled as the fields lapped right up to the houses. This popu…
People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory
Silencing youth sexuality in Senegal: Intersections of medicine and morality
This article reports on recent research funded by international development actors which explored how Senegalese youth acted as ‘active citizens’ and claimed their education and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) rights. Our analysis is framed by a review of contemporary international development discourses that seem to offer fertile possibilities for more plural understandings of sexuality. After describing the research methodology and methods…
Dynamics of gender justice, conflict and social cohesion: Analysing educational reforms in Pakistan
This paper analyses the role of national level reforms in the school curriculum and initial teacher education in gender justice in conflict-affected Pakistan, using a multidisciplinary framework applied to multiple data sets from selected teacher education institutions in Sindh. The school curriculum texts analysed potentially perpetuate gender injustice and foster conflict. While teacher education reforms offer the potential for transformative g…
Teachers as agents of peace? Exploring teacher agency in social cohesion in Pakistan
This paper studies an under-researched area – teachers’ role in peacebuilding in conflict-affected contexts – through exploring teacher agency for social cohesion in Pakistan. Insights are sought into teachers’ perspectives on the major drivers of conflict in society and the role of education and teachers in social cohesion and mitigating inequities in education. A 4Rs framework of redistribution, recognition, representation and reconciliation wa…
Youth negotiation of citizenship identities in Pakistan: Implications for global citizenship education in conflict-contexts
This study explores young students’ negotiation of their citizenship identities at the intersection of their class, gender, religious and ethnic identifications in the conflict-affected setting of Pakistan. While much of the global literature on global citizenship education (GCE) primarily takes into account the perspectives of middle-class or elite students located in richer economies, the current study is centred on a socio-demographically dive…
What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History
Becoming a teacher: Experiences of female trainees in initial teacher education in Nigeria
National identities and the external other in Muslim majority contexts: Youth narratives in Pakistan and Senegal
This paper focuses on youth’s constructions of their national identities in two contrasting Muslim-majority contexts – Senegal and Pakistan – with very different histories of nation-state formation and post-independence trajectories. Drawing on case study research, we take up the historical specificities of their respective state formations and emergence as independent nations from their colonial past. After describing our theoretical frameworks …
Understanding agency differently: Female youth's Muslim identities
This paper draws on our recent research into Muslim youth identities to consider theoretical and methodological issues with respect to gender and Muslim women's agency. Western constructions of Muslim women often portray them in essentialised ways as subordinated and without agency. We take up alternative theoretical frameworks that illuminate the limitations of modern understandings of the self and agency, and in particular their problematic ass…
Pluralising Islam: Doing Muslim identities differently
This paper challenges the stereotypical homogenisation of Islam often circulated in global discourses. We do this by focusing on the different ways youth across four national case studies constructed their religious identities. The analysis is informed by our understanding that local, national and global discourses are significant to the interpellation of subjects and the production of identities. These on-going processes produce plurality and di…
Gender symbolism and the expression of post-colonial national and religious identities
This paper traces the symbolic importance of gender to the assertion of national and religious identities drawing on case study data with youth from Senegal, Pakistan, Nigeria and Lebanon. We start with a brief overview of the theoretical and methodological approach to the research. We then illustrate the gender assumptions within youth identity narratives and the ways these produce masculinist and patriarchal national imaginaries that instantiat…
Archaeology: A Brief Introduction
Settlement and Landscape
The fearful khan and the delightful beauties’: The construction of gender in secondary school textbooks in Kazakhstan
This paper analyses how secondary school textbooks enact gender in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. As a ‘gender paradox’, with universal literacy and yet a higher representation of women at the tertiary level co-existing with multi-sectoral gaps at the expense of women, Kazakhstan offers an interesting context to empirically investigate the taken for granted relationship between education, gender equality and sustainable development. Poststructuralist di…
The dawn of everything: A new history
This 526-page discourse is a reasoned argument for rejecting the notion of steady progress in the human past that challenges our assumptions about the origins of many aspects of modern human behavior, including farming, property, cities, democracy, and slavery. The authors take an anarchic position. They conclude that since we have organized ourselves in many ways in the past, so there are other ways of organizing ourselves beyond the current dom…
Conducting Focus Groups in Multicultural Educational Contexts: Lessons Learned and Methodological Insights
What happens when focus groups are conducted in challenging situations across languages, cultures, and educational settings? What adjustments might need to be made? How can adaptations be made while still maintaining the integrity of the research? Drawing on a multi-year study of gender and schooling in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, this article brings together researcher data from (1) informal discussion occurring after each focus group between the re…
Evolution of gender research in the social sciences in post-Soviet countries: A bibliometric analysis
While interest in mapping the patterns of publication and research in post-Soviet countries has been growing steadily, there is a gap in knowledge about how gender is featured in post-Soviet research and publications. Using a descriptive bibliometric approach and metadata extracted from 2822 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database for 1993–2021, this study seeks to understand the evolution of gender research in post-So…
School Leaders’ Well-Being during Times of Crisis: Insights from a Quantitative Study in Kazakhstan
Amidst increasing global pressures on school leaders, particularly during crises when unforeseen situations necessitate prompt and decisive action from them, understanding the multifaceted dimensions of their well-being is essential for ensuring effective leadership and maintaining educational quality. This study examines the well-being of school leaders during crises by analysing survey responses from 1299 school leaders in Kazakhstan. Employing…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Pedagogy (15 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Geography (8 works)