In this article, Thea Renda Abu El-Haj shares her research on how a group of Palestinian American high school youth understand themselves as members of the U.S. community, of the Palestinian American community, and of communities in Palestine. She argues that, for these youth, coming to terms with who they are has a great deal to do both with how they view themselves and how Palestinian Americans are viewed in the imagined community of the United States, especially after September 11, 2001. Her research reports on the tensions these youth face as they deal with school issues, like pledging allegiance to the U.S. flag, teacher harassment, and disciplinary sanctions related to being framed as "terrorists," that affect how they think about citizenship and belonging. Given the complex way these and other youth experience belonging, Abu El-Haj ends with a call for a greater commitment to, and a more nuanced understanding of, citizenship education.

This article examines how the perspectives and experiences of Arab American

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This article explores an Arab American community arts organization as a site for promoting youth civic participation and social activism. Studying a citizenship education project outside the school walls, and focusing on the arts as a medium for this work, foregrounds the role of the symbolic for engaging youth as active participants in democratic society. The article also examines the symbolic political argument for postnational citizenship that the young participants articulated through a film they produced. [Arab American youth, citizenship education, arts, immigration]

In this article, Thea Renda Abu El-Haj draws on qualitative research conducted with Palestinian American high school students to explore school as a key site for nation building. By focusing on their teachers' talk and practice, she examines how U.S. nationalism and national identities are produced through everyday racialized and gendered discourses and practices inside one school. She argues that this nation building is deeply entwined with the cultural logic that undergirds U.S. imperial ambitions in relation to the current "war on terror" and explores how productions of everyday nationalism and national belonging define an "American" identity in opposition to cultural and political traits and values assumed to characterize Islam. Ultimately, Abu El-Haj demonstrates how complex discourses about the United States engender a view of education as alternately a liberating and disciplining force for Arab American youth. She concludes with implications for educating teachers "to better address the complexities of teaching in contemporary contexts of global migration,transnationalism, and the war on terror."