A year after Kabul was captured by the Taliban in August 2021, three at-risk partners from NYU Afghanistan, a faculty-founded NGO, evacuated to New York City.

“The whole system collapsed overnight,” shared one scholar, Mohammad Jawed Nazari. "I knew that if the Taliban found out who I was working for, they would come for me. So, I deactivated my social media, deleted the contacts for all US colleagues, and tore up documents that related me to the US. Then I changed my house, contacted [Director of NYU Steinhardt's International Education program and NYU Afghanistan co-founder] Dana Burde, and told her we were in grave danger and didn’t know what might happen.”

Nazari, alongside Hamidullah Gharibzada and Abdul Hamid Hatsaandh, now studies and works at NYU Steinhardt, after a complicated process that took nearly a year and was the result of a collaboration between a network of offices across the School and University. 

“I’ve worked for a long time in international education, especially in emergency and conflict contexts. The atrocity in Afghanistan was a catalyst for me thinking about this seriously as a life-saving option," Nazari said. “I really thank Dana and everyone at NYU for supporting us. This was not a one-person job."

Learn more about the scholars and what it took for them to escape to New York. 

NYU Blueprints for Progressive Change in Juvenile Justice is an interdisciplinary working group seeking to understand and eliminate the disparities that school-aged children often encounter with the legal system. Faculty from across the University collaborate with policy and practice leaders to address these inequalities from different directions.

One method is the Suspension Representation Project, in which members of the NYU Steinhardt community work with students from the NYU School of Law to provide families with no-cost, high-quality representation at suspension hearings, while also giving the Law students valuable and holistic hands-on experience in the field.

As Sireen Irsheid, a postdoctoral fellow in juvenile justice, education, and mental health, shared, "It’s beautiful to have a team of faculty interested in school pushout and coming at it from very different interdisciplinary angles – which is what needs to happen. Working collaboratively on things outside of our silos makes us stronger. We need a village to help support our young people to make sure they’re not engaging in the legal system, intervene at the policy level, and ultimately disrupt the school-prison nexus.”

Read more about NYU Blueprints and the Suspension Representation Project. 

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