Abiya Ahmed

Abiya Ahmed is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at Stanford University. She studies the intersection of religion and education, and is affiliated with the Education and Jewish Studies concentration and with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford. Abiya is interested in using interdisciplinary approaches to understand how individuals and communities learn and interact with religion in formal and informal spaces, with special attention to Muslim and Jewish contexts. Her qualifying paper was an ethnographic study of an Islamic high school, which used anthropological and sociological perspectives to examine the “religious” at a religious school. Currently, she is researching how first-year college students form friendship networks, focusing on how racial, ethnic, and religious identities affect and are affected by these networks, with special attention to the role of intersectionality in this process.