Re-Imagining Migration was founded in 2017 at UCLA Graduate School of Education by Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Adam Strom. Veronica Boix-Mansilla joined our leadership team shortly after our founding. Members of the team have presented our work in a variety of settings, to a wide range of audiences, from the Vatican and the White House to small school-based learning communities and developed educational resources used by tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students around the world. We bring these experiences to the defining issue of our time.
Ashley Onike Aluko is the Teacher in Residence at Re-Imagining Migration. She is in her ninth year of what initially was a two-year commitment into education. Her passion for storytelling, social justice, secondary students and cognitive dissonance have found a perfect home in teaching history. She briefly left the classroom to coach and develop first and second-year teachers and help usher Culturally Relevant Pedagogy into the work of the Teach for America Memphis Region. But then returned to the classroom and expanded that love to developing and designing curriculum resources for teachers that cause everyone to examine her favorite question: Why/How did we get here. Her work with Re-Imagining Migration focuses on the indelible impact of movement on the development of our democracy, particularly diasporic movements that have had for teachers and future citizens alike.
Verónica Boix-Mansilla is the Research Director of Re-imagining Migration and Senior Principal Investigator at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research examines the conditions that enable individuals to understand and act with others on the most pressing issues of our times (migration and globalization) through quality disciplinary and interdisciplinary work in formal and informal educational settings. At Re-imagining Migration, she is co-developing a research-based comprehensive framework for quality education of immigrant-origin youth and their peers. She also examines how teachers develop their capacity to educate for global competence with quality. She works with the OECD, the International Baccalaureate, the DC Public Schools, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and other institutions to advance global education innovations. She co-developed the OECD Global Competence Framework in 2018 and published multiple papers and books: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World (2011) with Tony Jackson.
Patricia Caesar is Director of Strategy at Re-Imagining Migration and President of St. James Strategy, a firm providing business planning, strategy, organizational development, and marketing services to nonprofit organizations and foundations that address a broad range of social, economic, health, and cultural issues. Clients include the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Center for Women and Information Technology, and Brady Campaign for the Prevention of Gun Violence. Caesar has also consulted for the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor, and Justice and has conducted training for The Conference Board, Social Enterprise Alliance, and Philanthropy New York among others. Patricia has served on the board of directors of WITNESS, Facing History, CASEL, Greyston Foundation, Cue Art Foundation and God’s Love We Deliver. She received a B.A. from Brandeis University and an M.Ed. from Columbia University, where she was a Ford Foundation Fellow in the Program for Educational Leadership.
Lexi Gewertz is the Chief Operating Officer at Re-Imagining Migration. Throughout her own education and career, Gewertz has been committed to bringing together ethnically and religiously diverse populations to build stronger, more resilient communities. Gewertz received her Master of Theological Studies degree at Harvard Divinity School, focusing her research on religion in public school education, Judaism, and Islam. She later served as the Assistant Director at the Pluralism Project at Harvard University—an organization that studies the changing religious landscape of the United States—where she oversaw operations, created and curated educational resources, and directed graduate student research on religious diversity in America. At Re-Imagining Migration, Gewertz oversees the logistics and operations of programs, projects, and processes to ensure that the organization runs smoothly, properly supports its staff, and continues to deliver high-quality resources and training to educators and the wider public.
Monica Hanna is the Development Associate at Re-Imagining Migration. Hanna earned her JD from the University of Oregon School of Law with a certificate in international law. While attending law school, she developed an interest in and passion for the important work of nonprofits. Following law school, she completed two years of service as an AmeriCorps Fellow at a Los Angeles nonprofit that connected volunteers to students in the Los Angeles Unified School District to help them achieve grade-level literacy. Hanna went on to work at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles where she fundraised for L.A. Public Library’s children and teen programs and participated in the evaluation of library programs and organizational strategic planning. As a first-generation immigrant, Hanna has dedicated her career to ensuring that children from all backgrounds receive the support and resources they need to build a strong educational foundation for their futures.
Dr. Juliana Karras is a Research Fellow at Re-imagining Migration and an Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychology at San Francisco State University. Juliana Karras-Jean Gilles’ work straddles both developmental and social research areas by focusing on the social development of children and adolescents in context. Specifically: the intersection of race, inequality, and civic development; attitudes towards and conceptions of children’s human rights; and ethnic/racial inequality across contexts. The goal of her work is to advance the human rights of children through actionable science by generating empirical knowledge that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can use to identify and rectify social systems that reproduce inequality in development.
Abeer Shinnawi is the Associate Director of Programs at Re-Imagining Migration. Shinnawi is a veteran middle school social studies teacher who has used her own upbringing as a child of immigrants to help connect students, schools and communities. Throughout her career, she has worked with schools, cultural institutions, and publishers to provide curriculum, content, and activities that reflect BIPOC students and teachers. Before joining the team at Re-Imagining Migration, she worked as a resource teacher in the Baltimore County Public Schools Office of Social Studies, leading curriculum development and supporting teachers. In addition, she served as an equity liaison and the co-facilitator of an affinity group for teachers of color. She also created and facilitated a student support group that provided safe spaces for immigrant students.
Adam Strom is the Director of Re-Imagining Migration. Throughout his career, Mr. Strom has connected the academy to classrooms and the community by using the latest scholarship to encourage learning about identity, bias, belonging, history, and the challenges and opportunities of civic engagement in our globalized world. The resources developed under Strom’s direction have been used in tens of thousands of classrooms and experienced by millions of students around the world including Stories of Identity: Religion, Migration, and Belonging in a Changing World and What Do We Do with a Difference? France and The Debate Over Headscarves in Schools, Identity, and Belonging in a Changing Great Britain, and the viewer’s guide to I Learn America. Before joining the Re-imagining Migration Project, Strom was the Director of Scholarship and Innovation at Facing History and Ourselves.
Contact Us
To send us snail mail we are located at 50 Milk St, 18th Floor, Boston, MA 02109.
To reach us by email, write to us at info@reimaginingmigration.org.