Zohra Saed

In Fall 2021, I began my work at Macaulay Honors College, carrying with me the deep affection I held for my years as an assistant professor at Bard High School Early College Queens. At Bard Queens, I learned alongside students who were diligent, imaginative, and generous in their thinking, some of whom I now unexpectedly meet again in Macaulay classrooms. This continuity has reminded me that teaching rarely ends where we think it does.

It moves. It wanders. It returns.

Teaching, for me, has always been rooted in empathy, creativity, and what Langston Hughes once described as the wisdom of wandering, learning by moving across texts, histories, and lived experience without demanding immediate resolution. Macaulay has given me the space to weave together scholarship, advocacy, and pedagogy in ways that honor curiosity and collective growth rather than speed or extraction.

Over these past three years, I have been able to wander intellectually and professionally, deepening my commitment to Central Asian studies while resisting the reduction of my place of origin, languages, histories, and people into objects of study. Instead, I approach writing and teaching as acts of connection. Ibn Sina reminds us that to demonstrate love for humanity, one must entwine oneself with others. This philosophy guides my classrooms.

My students do not simply study texts; they enter into conversation with authors, archives, neighborhoods, and community members. Literature becomes dialogic. Research becomes relational. Learning becomes a shared responsibility.

These pages reflect the outcomes of my time at Macaulay, years devoted to weaving scholarship, empathy, and action. What follows is not a list of accomplishments but a record of practices: projects shaped by care, attention, and the belief that knowledge must circulate beyond institutional walls.

More photographs from the field will be shared soon.

Justice and Equity in the Honors Network

was a collaborative teaching and learning initiative developed across institutions, in partnership with Arizona State University and Dean Olga Idriss Davis. The course invited students into sustained conversation across distance, difference, and lived experience, foregrounding justice as a collective and relational practice.

Through shared readings, online synthesis sessions, and in-person gatherings, JEHN created a space for students to think together about oppression, resistance, and the slow, necessary work of equity over a week-long, fully funded Washington, DC trip. Students brought their own histories and commitments into dialogue with writers and thinkers such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, and Grace Lee Boggs. What emerged was care and a community shaped by listening, disagreement, and the courage to remain present with difficult questions.

The Justice and Equity in the Honors Network was a collaborative, multi-institutional curriculum developed in partnership with Arizona State University and Dean Olga Idriss Davis. Designed as a year-long sequence of shared readings, online synthesis sessions, and experiential learning, the course invited students into sustained conversation across distance, difference, and lived experience.

Food Studies: Food, Identity, and Power in America

In Food, Identity, and Power in America, MHC 352, course that I designed food became a way of thinking about care, labor, and belonging. The course moved beyond the classroom and into neighborhoods, kitchens, and shared tables, where students learned to treat food as an archive, a memory, and a method.

The semester culminated in an Afghan Family Picnic, organized in support of a newly arrived Afghan family. Students cooked, gathered supplies, raised funds, and hosted the day together. The picnic was not an assignment so much as an act of presence, a reminder that learning can be generous, collective, and responsive to real lives unfolding alongside our own.

In Food, Identity, and Power in America, the Afghan Family Picnic emerged from a scaffolded, semester-long assignment that trained students in archival research, neighborhood study, and oral history before asking them to translate that learning into collective action.

Little Central Asia in South Brooklyn: A Collaborative Map

During the launch of the Little Central Asia in South Brooklyn project, invited speakers reflected on how rare and how necessary it is to see Central Asian businesses gathered in one visible place. They spoke of the importance of creating a shared resource that people can return to, navigate, and use: a space that affirms presence while supporting livelihoods.

The mapping project emerged from a desire to notice what is often overlooked. Students walked the neighborhood, entered restaurants and shops, listened to stories, and documented the everyday labor that sustains diasporic life.

The work continues beyond the map itself. Ongoing documentation, interviews, and student research are being shaped into a final published material, ensuring that these stories of migration, work, and community remain accessible beyond the moment of the course. The project thus becomes both practical and enduring: a living archive that grows into publication, and a record of Central Asian presence in South Brooklyn created with and for the community.

The Little Central Asia in South Brooklyn mapping project was developed as a course-based, community-engaged research assignment in Central Asian Literature and Film, designed to teach students fieldwork methods, ethical documentation, and digital storytelling.