Ankhi G. Thakurta is a PhD student in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education division at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. An Indian American woman and migrant to the United States, she has held various roles in the education field. After college, for example, she supported undergraduate writers as a Global Academic Fellow in the United Arab Emirates at New York University in Abu Dhabi. Next, she taught eighth grade English Language Arts at a New York City public school. At Penn, she managed Dr. Gerald Campano and Dr. Maria Paula Ghiso's Philadelphia-based research practice partnership which is dedicated to exploring issues of educational equity and access alongside culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse communities.

Ankhi's research interests include the literacies of urban children and youth of Asian descent, critical civic reading/writing curriculum development, transnational childhoods, and community-based education. Her principal aim as a scholar-practitioner is to cultivate critical literacy education opportunities for urban migrant children and youth from minoritized communities in and beyond the United States. Her research has been featured in various journals including the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Voices from the Middle, and Urban Education. Her work has been funded by the 2021 English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Graduate Student Award, and by a 2022 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.

Ankhi is also a visual artist who is interested in how arts-based methods can be utilized in processes of data collection and analysis. A link to her artwork-focused Instagram account can be found in the blue bar at the top of this page.

Ankhi's research interests include literacy, urban studies, multimodality, transnational feminism, practitioner inquiry, girlhood studies, and community based research, and visual analytic methods.

Peer-Reviewed Journals

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*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, (2): 4 - 24.

Thakurta, A. (2014). An inside job? Revisiting disciplinary conceptions of "native" anthropology. Electra Street, The NYUAD Journal of Arts and Humanities. 1(1): 55-68.

Book Chapters/Bibliographies

Campano, G., Ghiso, M.P., & Thakurta, A. (2022). Community-based partnerships: Advancing epistemic rights through improvement research. In D.J. Peurach, J.L. Russell, L. Cohen-Vogel, & W.R. Penuel (Eds.), The foundational handbook on improvement research in education (pp. 189-210)

Thakurta, A., Ogburn, L., Rosado-Viurques, A. (2021). Minding the school-community leadership gap: Reframing for critical praxis. In Katherine Pak & Sharon Ravitch (Eds.), Critical Leadership Praxis: Leading Educational and Social Change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Campano, G., Ghiso, M.P., & Thakurta, A. (2021). Literacy teaching for equity: The epistemic privilege of non-dominant identities and communities of inquiry. In Margaret Vaughn & Seth Parsons (Eds.), Principles of Effective Literacy Instruction. Guilford.

Asaah, G., Thakurta, A., Ghiso, M.P., & Campano, G. (2020). Equity and improvement: Engaging students, families, and communities. In Oxford Bibliographies in Education. Ed. Anne Hynds. New York: Oxford University Press.

Editorial Introductions

Thakurta, A. G. & Smith, A. (2022). Flexibility by and for design: Reimagining learning structures in unsettled times. Voices from the Middle, 29(3).

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.

Campano, G., Stornaiuolo, A., Thomas, E. E., & Thakurta, A. (2020). Editors' introduction: Migration, literacy, and dislocation. Research in the Teaching of English, 54(3): 201-205.

*Denotes community partners.