I work on understanding how and why societies fall apart and what role education can play in rebuilding decimated countries. My most recent research examines a role of education in radicalization and de-radicalization. I have published on issues of corruption, exclusion of women, mobility, teaching quality, social transformation...etc. I am a survivor of ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia and I share my story of survival in my upcoming book, published worldwide on Sept 8, 2020 (Bloomsbury). To learn more about my research, please visit: https://www.sabicelrayess.org/ and to hear my story of empowerment, please see: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/uceda/#watch-livestream
There is limited research on the effects of storytelling on the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) communit... more There is limited research on the effects of storytelling on the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) community’s sense of self, particularly on those individuals who have been displaced from their homeland due to violence and persecution. In the field of education, such an analysis is particularly cogent considering that the physical displacement and ethnic segregation the Bosniak community experienced in the 1990s was built on multigenerational displacement from the educational system in the former Yugoslavia. Educational displacement translates into being invisible and unacknowledged in the educational curricula, leaving a permanent imprint on those affected. In the case of Bosniaks, their lived experiences and representations were transposed from mainstream curriculum in schools in the former Yugoslavia, engendering a feeling of a lesser contribution, meaning, and value to society relative to non-Bosniaks. This marginalization still reverberates through Bosniak collective thinking and culture, at home and abroad.
This chapter explores the role of storytelling in the process of healing, recognition, inclusion, and empowerment of Bosniaks deracinated by the Bosnian Genocide. Storytelling is a necessary step to heal and gain a sense of belonging for those in diaspora and in the homeland. I investigate the role of The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival in initiating a cross-national conversation within the virtual and physical Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the book’s release, I received a significant amount of public feedback and reactions from the Bosniak community about the impact of my autobiographical account as a genocide survivor. Through content analysis, I detect patterns in this engagement relating to notions of recognition, identity, empowerment, healing, inclusion, and belonging using theories of transformative learning, incidental learning, educational displacement, and recognition. I demonstrate the power of storytelling that has fueled societal acknowledgment within diaspora communities and broader recognition of the Bosnian Genocide.
The following section details the various displacements of Bosniaks in the years leading up to the 1992–1995 conflict with a particular focus on educational displacement. The sections thereafter examine the public social media engagement and posts I have received as a measure of engagement from Bosniak diaspora members and those living in Bosnia proper relative to the impact of The Cat I Never Named. I show the effect the book has had on Bosniaks’ sense of self through public social media engagement. I also address the relevance of autobiographical accounts, examine the ef- fectiveness of storytelling, and reflect on my positionality, something the chapters in this volume by Dino Kadich and by Mišo Kapetanović also problematize for scholarship more broadly. The chapter demonstrates how empowerment can happen at the intersection of storytelling, public social media engagement, and education.
<p>Corruption is a societal problem which adversely affects nations' efforts to improve... more <p>Corruption is a societal problem which adversely affects nations' efforts to improve lives of their citizens. It is normally thought to be centered on government procurement, taxation, and legal decisions and not in education. But it is a problem in education. How serious is it? The difficulty of responding to this question is that corruption in education, as with all illegal and unprofessional activities, is difficult to accurately measure. This limits researchers to predicting institutional and systemic levels of corruption by relying primarily on individual perceptions. Measuring direct experience with corruption is more difficult and hence more rare. Since 1993, Transparency International has taken a global pulse of corruption by conducting the world's largest corruption survey to derive the Corruption Perception Index and rank nations from the most to the least corrupt. When it comes to corruption research, participants generally hesitate to share their experiences for fear of repercussions, which is why less corruption is likely to be reported than may be actually occurring within education systems. Corruption is manifest in a wide variety of forms. A broad range of literature on corruption in education has been published in the early 21st century, with the goal of defining corruption typologies and examining the effects which corruption has on education systems and those who depend on those education systems. But anticorruption efforts in education have had limited success and more research is needed on non-pecuniary forms of corruption and their relation to elite formation and institutionalized racism.</p>
MAKING OF A VOICELESS YOUTH: CORRUPTION IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA’S HIGHER EDUCATION Amra Sabic-E... more MAKING OF A VOICELESS YOUTH: CORRUPTION IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA’S HIGHER EDUCATION Amra Sabic-El-Rayess This research has analyzed a set of structural elements, procedures, and behaviors within Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (thereafter, “Bosnia” or “B&H”) higher education that have jointly created an encouraging space for the increasing and self-serving utilization of higher education by the country’s post-war elite. Of the particular interest is this elite’s impact on the forms of educational corruption, which have shifted away from standard bribing processes and moved toward more complex favor reciprocation networks. This process has ensured that today’s corruption is perceived as a norm in Bosnia’s higher education. Its prevalence has disrupted existing social mobility mechanisms and created a duality in the social mobility process so that the unprivileged still work hard to obtain their degrees while those with social connections are reliant on Turner’s (1960) sponsorship model. Th...
Indonesian Journal on Learning and Advanced Education (IJOLAE), 2020
In the last decade, Indonesia has worked towards expanding access to higher education, but the en... more In the last decade, Indonesia has worked towards expanding access to higher education, but the enrolment of the poor remains negligible with the majority of students in the country’s leading public universities still coming from Indonesia’s wealthiest echelons. Concerned with the issue of equity and access, the government has formulated a new policy calling on all higher education institutions to ensure at least 20% of their newly admitted students are of a low socioeconomic status (SES). The principal challenge the government has faced is a discrepancy between its ambitious political agenda and the policy’s implementation affected by inadequate budgeting, lacking implementation mechanisms, and limited award allocations. This challenge raises a question of whether the Equity and Access Policy can be effectively implemented and, if so, under what conditions can such success be achieved. We thus examine the country’s Equity and Access Policy, education system with its leadership struc...
Indonesian Journal on Learning and Advanced Education (IJOLAE), 2019
In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the wo... more In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the world, but we are yet to fully understand who remains excluded and why. Globally, 2 billion adults are still unbanked (World Bank, 2015). Of those, many are poor women. Even when they gain financial access, women tend to refrain from actively using their bank accounts. India represents a potent example of this global challenge. Our study offers a quantitative analysis of the Financial Insights Inclusion and Findex datasets and finds that even when they are given the opportunity and potential benefits of financial access - many of India’s poor women opt out of actively engaging with the formal banking institutions. In examining reasons behind their account dormancy, we find that education is a significant determinant shaping decisions of India’s poor women.
Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2019
ABSTRACT Research on the effect of school uniforms on school attendance in low income countries i... more ABSTRACT Research on the effect of school uniforms on school attendance in low income countries is scarce. Building on a meta-analysis of the available literature, this paper analyses primary survey data collected (n = 462) in Mongolia on students’ perceptions of school uniforms. The findings reveal that it is not only the cost of uniforms that matters, but also poor students’ feelings of exclusion when the majority of students in a school wear uniforms. The poor drop out from school when their symbolic association with the majority is visibly broken through their inability to afford and wear school uniforms. The study suggests that school uniform policies in low income countries are fraught with complications. Instead of creating cohesion, such policies are more likely to affect poor students’ negative perceptions of themselves and play a strong role in dropout rates.
Indonesian Journal of Learning and Advanced Education, 2019
In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the wo... more In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the world, but we are yet to fully understand who remains excluded and why. Globally, 2 billion adults are still unbanked. Of those, many are poor women. Even when they gain financial access, women tend to refrain from actively using their bank accounts. India represents a potent example of this global challenge. Our study offers a quantitative analysis of the Financial Insights Inclusion and Findex datasets and finds that even when they are given the opportunity and potential benefits of financial access-many of India's poor women opt out of actively engaging with the formal banking institutions. In examining reasons behind their account dormancy, we find that education is a significant determinant shaping decisions of India's poor women.
Very little is known about how violent extremist practices are learned, and the role of education... more Very little is known about how violent extremist practices are learned, and the role of educational channels through which they are spread. This empirical study extrapolates insights specific to the Bosnian and Herzegovinian context to demonstrate how one ultraconservative ideology, Salafism, can radically alter the dominant thinking and behavior of ordinary individuals once they feel displaced from the mainstream institutions and particularly from the formal education. At the core of the displacement and replacement model of radicalization is an informal and tactful teacher, influencer, or a mentor that individuals connect with either online or in person. Using the primary data collected in Bosnia and Herzegovina through 20 in-depth and semi-structured interviews with radicalized persons, the study sequences a ten-step radicalization model through which the interviewees have transformed from ordinary citizens into radicalized actors with a potential to engage in violent extremism. 2. Background: emergence of different forms of radicalization in Bosnia and Herzegovina Helped by Bosnian Serbs, Serbia invaded Bosnia and Herzegovina in ☆ This research has been funded by The Smith Richardson Foundation (USA), Grant #20150816.
I theorize that the idea of knowledge and education has shifted in Islam from an inclusive and ra... more I theorize that the idea of knowledge and education has shifted in Islam from an inclusive and rational search for all knowledge to a narrowed focus on religious knowledge, void of rationality. By synthesizing literature on education and knowledge in Islam, this study identifies three shifts in the cultural history of Islamic education. I argue that those shifts in what was deemed valuable knowledge have played a significant role in the emergence of radicalization today. The study shows that once the social world of Islam destabilized, the sense of belonging and sense making became inward and less reflexive as compared to that of early Muslims. Belief became privileged over the rationality mechanisms that had previously formed Islamic endeavors. I demonstrate that a decline in intellectual and scientific production followed, allowing extremists to skew Islam's narrative by putting forward an idealized version of the Islamic caliphate divorced from rationality.
There is limited research on the effects of storytelling on the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) communit... more There is limited research on the effects of storytelling on the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) community’s sense of self, particularly on those individuals who have been displaced from their homeland due to violence and persecution. In the field of education, such an analysis is particularly cogent considering that the physical displacement and ethnic segregation the Bosniak community experienced in the 1990s was built on multigenerational displacement from the educational system in the former Yugoslavia. Educational displacement translates into being invisible and unacknowledged in the educational curricula, leaving a permanent imprint on those affected. In the case of Bosniaks, their lived experiences and representations were transposed from mainstream curriculum in schools in the former Yugoslavia, engendering a feeling of a lesser contribution, meaning, and value to society relative to non-Bosniaks. This marginalization still reverberates through Bosniak collective thinking and culture, at home and abroad.
This chapter explores the role of storytelling in the process of healing, recognition, inclusion, and empowerment of Bosniaks deracinated by the Bosnian Genocide. Storytelling is a necessary step to heal and gain a sense of belonging for those in diaspora and in the homeland. I investigate the role of The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival in initiating a cross-national conversation within the virtual and physical Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the book’s release, I received a significant amount of public feedback and reactions from the Bosniak community about the impact of my autobiographical account as a genocide survivor. Through content analysis, I detect patterns in this engagement relating to notions of recognition, identity, empowerment, healing, inclusion, and belonging using theories of transformative learning, incidental learning, educational displacement, and recognition. I demonstrate the power of storytelling that has fueled societal acknowledgment within diaspora communities and broader recognition of the Bosnian Genocide.
The following section details the various displacements of Bosniaks in the years leading up to the 1992–1995 conflict with a particular focus on educational displacement. The sections thereafter examine the public social media engagement and posts I have received as a measure of engagement from Bosniak diaspora members and those living in Bosnia proper relative to the impact of The Cat I Never Named. I show the effect the book has had on Bosniaks’ sense of self through public social media engagement. I also address the relevance of autobiographical accounts, examine the ef- fectiveness of storytelling, and reflect on my positionality, something the chapters in this volume by Dino Kadich and by Mišo Kapetanović also problematize for scholarship more broadly. The chapter demonstrates how empowerment can happen at the intersection of storytelling, public social media engagement, and education.
<p>Corruption is a societal problem which adversely affects nations' efforts to improve... more <p>Corruption is a societal problem which adversely affects nations' efforts to improve lives of their citizens. It is normally thought to be centered on government procurement, taxation, and legal decisions and not in education. But it is a problem in education. How serious is it? The difficulty of responding to this question is that corruption in education, as with all illegal and unprofessional activities, is difficult to accurately measure. This limits researchers to predicting institutional and systemic levels of corruption by relying primarily on individual perceptions. Measuring direct experience with corruption is more difficult and hence more rare. Since 1993, Transparency International has taken a global pulse of corruption by conducting the world's largest corruption survey to derive the Corruption Perception Index and rank nations from the most to the least corrupt. When it comes to corruption research, participants generally hesitate to share their experiences for fear of repercussions, which is why less corruption is likely to be reported than may be actually occurring within education systems. Corruption is manifest in a wide variety of forms. A broad range of literature on corruption in education has been published in the early 21st century, with the goal of defining corruption typologies and examining the effects which corruption has on education systems and those who depend on those education systems. But anticorruption efforts in education have had limited success and more research is needed on non-pecuniary forms of corruption and their relation to elite formation and institutionalized racism.</p>
MAKING OF A VOICELESS YOUTH: CORRUPTION IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA’S HIGHER EDUCATION Amra Sabic-E... more MAKING OF A VOICELESS YOUTH: CORRUPTION IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA’S HIGHER EDUCATION Amra Sabic-El-Rayess This research has analyzed a set of structural elements, procedures, and behaviors within Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (thereafter, “Bosnia” or “B&H”) higher education that have jointly created an encouraging space for the increasing and self-serving utilization of higher education by the country’s post-war elite. Of the particular interest is this elite’s impact on the forms of educational corruption, which have shifted away from standard bribing processes and moved toward more complex favor reciprocation networks. This process has ensured that today’s corruption is perceived as a norm in Bosnia’s higher education. Its prevalence has disrupted existing social mobility mechanisms and created a duality in the social mobility process so that the unprivileged still work hard to obtain their degrees while those with social connections are reliant on Turner’s (1960) sponsorship model. Th...
Indonesian Journal on Learning and Advanced Education (IJOLAE), 2020
In the last decade, Indonesia has worked towards expanding access to higher education, but the en... more In the last decade, Indonesia has worked towards expanding access to higher education, but the enrolment of the poor remains negligible with the majority of students in the country’s leading public universities still coming from Indonesia’s wealthiest echelons. Concerned with the issue of equity and access, the government has formulated a new policy calling on all higher education institutions to ensure at least 20% of their newly admitted students are of a low socioeconomic status (SES). The principal challenge the government has faced is a discrepancy between its ambitious political agenda and the policy’s implementation affected by inadequate budgeting, lacking implementation mechanisms, and limited award allocations. This challenge raises a question of whether the Equity and Access Policy can be effectively implemented and, if so, under what conditions can such success be achieved. We thus examine the country’s Equity and Access Policy, education system with its leadership struc...
Indonesian Journal on Learning and Advanced Education (IJOLAE), 2019
In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the wo... more In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the world, but we are yet to fully understand who remains excluded and why. Globally, 2 billion adults are still unbanked (World Bank, 2015). Of those, many are poor women. Even when they gain financial access, women tend to refrain from actively using their bank accounts. India represents a potent example of this global challenge. Our study offers a quantitative analysis of the Financial Insights Inclusion and Findex datasets and finds that even when they are given the opportunity and potential benefits of financial access - many of India’s poor women opt out of actively engaging with the formal banking institutions. In examining reasons behind their account dormancy, we find that education is a significant determinant shaping decisions of India’s poor women.
Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2019
ABSTRACT Research on the effect of school uniforms on school attendance in low income countries i... more ABSTRACT Research on the effect of school uniforms on school attendance in low income countries is scarce. Building on a meta-analysis of the available literature, this paper analyses primary survey data collected (n = 462) in Mongolia on students’ perceptions of school uniforms. The findings reveal that it is not only the cost of uniforms that matters, but also poor students’ feelings of exclusion when the majority of students in a school wear uniforms. The poor drop out from school when their symbolic association with the majority is visibly broken through their inability to afford and wear school uniforms. The study suggests that school uniform policies in low income countries are fraught with complications. Instead of creating cohesion, such policies are more likely to affect poor students’ negative perceptions of themselves and play a strong role in dropout rates.
Indonesian Journal of Learning and Advanced Education, 2019
In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the wo... more In recent times, the global financial system has embraced more people from more regions of the world, but we are yet to fully understand who remains excluded and why. Globally, 2 billion adults are still unbanked. Of those, many are poor women. Even when they gain financial access, women tend to refrain from actively using their bank accounts. India represents a potent example of this global challenge. Our study offers a quantitative analysis of the Financial Insights Inclusion and Findex datasets and finds that even when they are given the opportunity and potential benefits of financial access-many of India's poor women opt out of actively engaging with the formal banking institutions. In examining reasons behind their account dormancy, we find that education is a significant determinant shaping decisions of India's poor women.
Very little is known about how violent extremist practices are learned, and the role of education... more Very little is known about how violent extremist practices are learned, and the role of educational channels through which they are spread. This empirical study extrapolates insights specific to the Bosnian and Herzegovinian context to demonstrate how one ultraconservative ideology, Salafism, can radically alter the dominant thinking and behavior of ordinary individuals once they feel displaced from the mainstream institutions and particularly from the formal education. At the core of the displacement and replacement model of radicalization is an informal and tactful teacher, influencer, or a mentor that individuals connect with either online or in person. Using the primary data collected in Bosnia and Herzegovina through 20 in-depth and semi-structured interviews with radicalized persons, the study sequences a ten-step radicalization model through which the interviewees have transformed from ordinary citizens into radicalized actors with a potential to engage in violent extremism. 2. Background: emergence of different forms of radicalization in Bosnia and Herzegovina Helped by Bosnian Serbs, Serbia invaded Bosnia and Herzegovina in ☆ This research has been funded by The Smith Richardson Foundation (USA), Grant #20150816.
I theorize that the idea of knowledge and education has shifted in Islam from an inclusive and ra... more I theorize that the idea of knowledge and education has shifted in Islam from an inclusive and rational search for all knowledge to a narrowed focus on religious knowledge, void of rationality. By synthesizing literature on education and knowledge in Islam, this study identifies three shifts in the cultural history of Islamic education. I argue that those shifts in what was deemed valuable knowledge have played a significant role in the emergence of radicalization today. The study shows that once the social world of Islam destabilized, the sense of belonging and sense making became inward and less reflexive as compared to that of early Muslims. Belief became privileged over the rationality mechanisms that had previously formed Islamic endeavors. I demonstrate that a decline in intellectual and scientific production followed, allowing extremists to skew Islam's narrative by putting forward an idealized version of the Islamic caliphate divorced from rationality.
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This chapter explores the role of storytelling in the process of healing, recognition, inclusion, and empowerment of Bosniaks deracinated by the Bosnian Genocide. Storytelling is a necessary step to heal and gain a sense of belonging for those in diaspora and in the homeland. I investigate the role of The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival in initiating a cross-national conversation within the virtual and physical Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the book’s release, I received a significant amount of public feedback and reactions from the Bosniak community about the impact of my autobiographical account as a genocide survivor. Through content analysis, I detect patterns in this engagement relating to notions of recognition, identity, empowerment, healing, inclusion, and belonging using theories of transformative learning, incidental learning, educational displacement, and recognition. I demonstrate the power of storytelling that has fueled societal acknowledgment within diaspora communities and broader recognition of the Bosnian Genocide.
The following section details the various displacements of Bosniaks in the years leading up to the 1992–1995 conflict with a particular focus on educational displacement. The sections thereafter examine the public social media engagement and posts I have received as a measure of engagement from Bosniak diaspora members and those living in Bosnia proper relative to the impact of The Cat I Never Named. I show the effect the book has had on Bosniaks’ sense of self through public social media engagement. I also address the relevance of autobiographical accounts, examine the ef- fectiveness of storytelling, and reflect on my positionality, something the chapters in this volume by Dino Kadich and by Mišo Kapetanović also problematize for scholarship more broadly. The chapter demonstrates how empowerment can happen at the intersection of storytelling, public social media engagement, and education.
This chapter explores the role of storytelling in the process of healing, recognition, inclusion, and empowerment of Bosniaks deracinated by the Bosnian Genocide. Storytelling is a necessary step to heal and gain a sense of belonging for those in diaspora and in the homeland. I investigate the role of The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival in initiating a cross-national conversation within the virtual and physical Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the book’s release, I received a significant amount of public feedback and reactions from the Bosniak community about the impact of my autobiographical account as a genocide survivor. Through content analysis, I detect patterns in this engagement relating to notions of recognition, identity, empowerment, healing, inclusion, and belonging using theories of transformative learning, incidental learning, educational displacement, and recognition. I demonstrate the power of storytelling that has fueled societal acknowledgment within diaspora communities and broader recognition of the Bosnian Genocide.
The following section details the various displacements of Bosniaks in the years leading up to the 1992–1995 conflict with a particular focus on educational displacement. The sections thereafter examine the public social media engagement and posts I have received as a measure of engagement from Bosniak diaspora members and those living in Bosnia proper relative to the impact of The Cat I Never Named. I show the effect the book has had on Bosniaks’ sense of self through public social media engagement. I also address the relevance of autobiographical accounts, examine the ef- fectiveness of storytelling, and reflect on my positionality, something the chapters in this volume by Dino Kadich and by Mišo Kapetanović also problematize for scholarship more broadly. The chapter demonstrates how empowerment can happen at the intersection of storytelling, public social media engagement, and education.