Hi, I’m Zora.

I’m a PhD Candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, studying the intersection of sociology of education, race and ethnicity, gender, and inequity. My research is driven by questions asking: How do South Asian Bangladeshi-American girls and women navigate family socialization? How do their educational experiences and pathways reflect the legacy of imperialism and empire? How do Bangladeshi-American women traverse expectations of them not only as students, but also as daughters?

At Harvard, I support the Critical Youth Work Collective research lab, the Contemporary Ethnography and Inequality Workshop, and am on the Editorial Board of the Harvard Educational Review academic journal. I’m also a Council Member of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Children and Youth Section, currently serving a two-year term as the elected Graduate Student Representative.

Before arriving at Harvard, I spent nearly a decade working in social policy research, conducting evaluations for after-school programs, school districts, and youth-oriented centers and organizations. I earned my Master’s in Public Policy at Brandeis University, and before that, my Bachelor’s in Psychology and Education at Clark University.

And before you go, I use she/her/hers pronouns, and my name is pronounced zo-ruh hawk.