Sahar D. Sattarzadeh

A daughter of Bahá'í refugees of Azeri, Kurdish, Persian, and Iranian heritage, Dr. Sahar D. Sattarzadeh, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Higher Education, Adult Learning, and Organizational Studies (HEALOS) at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) on the historic homelands of the Wichita and affiliated tribes, including the Caddo Nation, as well as other Native peoples who once considered this area home. She is also a research associate at the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University on the traditional and contemporary lands of the Khokhoi, San, and AmaXhosa (Port Elizabeth, South Africa). She also serves as an Editorial Board member for the International Journal of Human Rights Education.

 

Focusing on the noble capacities of historically and systematically "marginalized" Indigenous, ethnic, and racial communities, Dr. Sattarzadeh studies both the oppressive and reimagined, liberatory capacities of in/formal higher education. She also highlights how historically and systematically “marginalized” communities utilize in/formal modes of higher education, relationality, and servingness as activism in the face of injustices and inequities experienced within and beyond higher education and academia. Within the context of comparative global higher education, Dr. Sattarzadeh also studies the hegemonies of research (in the U.S. and globally) that perpetuate U.S.-/Eurocentrism, settler colonialism through oppressive dichotomies such as researcher-researched, “Global North”-“Global South,” “developed”-“developing, and oppressor-oppressed/victim. Such approaches to inquiry aim to reconceptualize notions of power, resistance, and knowledge within and beyond the student affairs/higher education contexts. Community and collaboration are also central to her research, particularly since it defies neoliberal cultures of elitism, individualism, and competition that often saturate curricula, policies, procedures, and practices in the field of (higher) education in general. Given the scope of these focal areas, her research inherently challenges the confining boundaries of academic fields and disciplines as "undisciplinary."