Convening Committee

George Mason University Team

Supriya Baily is Associate Professor at George Mason University in international and comparative education, teacher education and qualitative research methods. She is also the Associate Director of the Center for International Education. Her research interests focus on gender, education and empowerment, higher education access and teacher transformation. She is the co-editor of three books including the latest Experiments in Agency: A global partnership to transform teacher research (2017).

Meagan Call-Cummings is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research Methods at George Mason University. Dr. Call-Cummings’ research interests center on methodological orientations and epistemological commitments that promote and build peace and social justice. Her research tends to take participatory action research forms.

Gender and Education Standing Committee Team

Emily Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Education at Centenary University. Her research investigates the construction, diffusion, and negotiation of girls’ education policy discourses and the role/s of new media in girls’ education policy, activism, and advocacy. Dr. Anderson teaches social and cultural foundations of education, comparative and international education, and qualitative and action research methods in the Education Department programs.

Caroline (Carly) Manion is a Lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research interests include equity and social justice, gender and education, school improvement, the politics of education, civil society, and educational multilateralism and governance. Dr. Manion’s research has been supported by a variety of agencies and organizations, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the International Development Research Centre of Canada, the Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada).

Payal Shah is an Assistant Professor of Foundations of Education & Qualitative Inquiry at the University of South Carolina College of Education. Her research interests include gender, education and development, with particular interest in investigating gendered notions and discourses of modernity and empowerment for rural Indian girls and women. Dr. Shah employs critical, feminist, and decolonizing methodologies to conduct long term ethnographic research in India. She has published journal articles and book chapters across the fields of international and comparative education, qualitative inquiry, and women's and gender studies.

Norin Taj is a PhD student at OISE. She completed her Masters in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the University of Toronto. Her research interest is in global policy discourses and work of International organizations (IOs) around girls’ education, role of policy actors between global and local and educational management in Pakistan. She is the secretary of CIES-GEC and CIES-SASIG. When not working, she enjoys photographing and writing photo-poetry.

South Asia Special Interest Group Team

Radhika Iyengar has a Ph.D. in Economics of Education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 2011. Teachers College awarded her distinction on her dissertation on “Social Capital as a Determinant of Schooling in Rural India: A Mixed Methods Study.” As the Education Director for the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) for 10 countries in Africa and the Scale-up Operations at the Earth Institute Columbia University, Dr. Iyengar oversees multi- country research projects. She also holds an Adjunct Assistant Faculty position at the Teachers College, where she taught a graduate level course on Evaluation Research Methods and Data Analysis for Developing Countries.

Matthew Witenstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Education at the University of Redlands. His research focuses on the student development (including sociocultural and academic issues) of immigrants in education, international student experiences, and international/comparative education issues about organization and governance, and the barriers impeding marginalized populations from persisting through the PK-20 pipeline. Dr. Witenstein has worked extensively on projects throughout South Asia on the latter topics. He is the Chair of CIES' South Asia SIG and the Book Awards Committee Chair for the Higher Education SIG.