Arshad Ali is an educator, community worker, and scholar who studies youth culture, race, identity, and politics. He is Associate Professor of Educational Research at the George Washington University, where he directs the Education & Inequality PhD concentration. Dr. Ali’s research examines the construction of racial identities through exploring questions of democracy, liberalism, and modernity in the lives of youth. He has written extensively on issues relating to the cultural geography of Muslim student surveillance, citizenship, governmentality and other issues of coloniality and Muslims in Western spaces. He examines how economies of surveillance are scaled, both legally and ideologically, and how these scales of surveillance become manifest in the lives of Muslim youth in the United States. Dr. Ali is co-editor (with Teresa McCarty) of Critical Youth Research in Education: Methodologies of Praxis and Care and co-editor (with Tracy Lachica Buenavista) of Education at War: The Fight for Students of Color in America’s Public Schools, a collection of essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." He earned a master’s degree at Harvard University and a doctorate at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Teachers College, Columbia University and University College London. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D, he served as the founding director of MAPS, a university based outreach and political education program working with students in South Los Angeles. He has actively been a part of youth, community and student organizing for over twenty years.