Campion 115
Email: thakurta@dos5.net
ORCID 0000-0002-4773-519X
Secondary Curriculum and Instruction
Globalization, Mobility, and Education
Urban Migration; Civic Learning and identity formation; Community-Based Research; Arts-Based Research; Practitioner Inquiry; Teaching for Social Justice
Ankhi G. Thakurta is a literacy scholar, community-based educator, and former middle school English Language Arts teacher. Her research, which sits at the intersection of urban migration studies, critical literacy studies, and community-based practitioner studies, foregrounds the civic lives and learning of urban youth from racialized immigrant, migrant, and refugee communities. Besides exploring how these young people use everyday literacy practices (e.g., reading, writing, speaking, art-making) to learn about and assert themselves in the arena of democratic life, she also investigates how and to what extent critical literacy education – whether it is implemented in community or school-based settings – can foster their sociopolitical belonging. Ankhi’s work centralizes the literate, epistemic, and civic resources of urban immigrant, migrant, and refugee youth.
As a visual artist, Ankhi also examines how art-infused methods of knowledge production can be leveraged to conduct anti-racist, equity-oriented education research alongside historically marginalized communities. Overall, her commitments to engaging in justice-oriented scholarship and praxis are shaped by her identities as a bilingual immigrant Indian American woman, as a descendant of refugees, and as a former learner and educator in the U.S. public school system.
Ankhi’s research has been supported by funding from the English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) group of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship (2022), and other sources. Her work has appeared in journals such as Urban Education and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. In 2023, she received the Ralph C. Preston Award For Scholarship and Teaching Contributing to Social Justice and Educational Equity from the Reading/Writing/Literacy program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
Thakurta, A., Wan, C., & Campano, G. (forthcoming). Towards a border transgressing pedagogy: Disrupting oppressive ecologies of control, surveillance, and displacement in schools and beyond. In Paul Downes, Guofang Li, Lore Van Praag, and Stephen Lamb (Eds.), Routledge Handbook on Promoting Equity in Education through Inclusive Systems and Societies. Routledge.
Thakurta, A. G., & Smith, A. (2022). Flexibility by and for design: Reimagining learning structures in unsettled times. Voices from the Middle, 29(3), 14-17. http://www.proquest.com/openview/fb92ab2c36007ab32bf15146f7dab4f2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=33274.
Ghiso, M.P., Campano, G., Thakurta, A., & Vazquez, O*. (2022). Community-based research with immigrant families: Sustaining an intellectual commons of care, resistance, and solidarity in an urban intensive context. Urban Education. Online First. http://doi.org/10.1177/00420859221082676.
Campano, G., Ghiso, M.P., & Thakurta, A. (2022). Community-based partnerships: Advancing epistemic rights through improvement research. In Don Peurach, Jenn Russell, Lora Cohen-Vogel, Bill Penuel, David Eddy-Spicer, Amanda Datnow, Marisa Cannata, & Alan Daly (Eds.), The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education (pp. 189-210). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Staufert-Reyes E., Wan, C., Thakurta, A., Winsch, J., Sykes, Z.*, Luong, Q.* Ghiso, M.P. (2022). Cultivating virtual communities of care: Reflections on community-based research in times of sociopolitical precarity. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice. 71(1): 437-459. http://doi.org/10.1177/23813377221114479.
Thakurta, A. (2021). The door was always there: Transnational youth leverage their multiliteracies for civic justice. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 64(6): 645-656. http://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1148.
Thakurta, A., Kannan, C., Moon, J., & Ghiso, M.P. (2021). A seat at the table: Preparing youth to shape institutional change at an NCTE roundtable presentation. Voices From the Middle. 28(4): 69-74. http://library.ncte.org/journals/VM/issues/v28-4/31281.
Thakurta, A., Rogers, C., Thomas, E.E., Stornaiuolo, A., & Campano, G. (2021). Editors’ introduction: childhoods across borders. Research in the Teaching of English. 56(1), 5–9. http://doi.org/10.58680/rte202131340.
Thakurta, A. Kannan, C., *Setiawan, D., *Kosasih, M., Ghiso M.P., & Campano, G. (2020). The power of the collective in community-based education research. In Perspectives on Urban Education. Winter Issue. http://urbanedjournal.gse.upenn.edu/volume-17-spring-2020/power-collective-community-based-educational-research.
*Gultom, F…Thakurta, A., Kannan, C., *Vazquez, O., Narron, L., Campano, H. G. (2019). “What is home?” A collaborative multimodal inquiry project by transnational youth in South Philadelphia. In:cite journal, 1(2), 4–24. http://doi.org/10.33137/incite.2.32826
The Ralph C. Preston Award For Scholarship and Teaching Contributing to Social Justice and Educational Equity (Reading/Writing/Literacy program, Penn GSE) (2023)
AERA Writing and Literacies Special Interest Group (SIG) Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award, Honorary Mention (2022)
Graduate Student Award For Ethical Innovations in Research (2022)
English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Graduate Student Research Award ($2,500) (2021)
Literacy Research Association Area 8 Chair Award (2020) (shared)
University of Pennsylvania Office of the Provost Campaign for Community Award, “Exploring Racial Justice Alongside Communities of Color During COVID-19” ($1,000) (2020)(shared)
Phi Beta Kappa, Swarthmore College (2012)
Mark of Excellence Award in Journalism (2012) (shared)