Munira Kairat, a Ph.D. candidate at the UC Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, has been selected as a 2026 National Academy of Education (NAEd) Spencer Dissertation Fellow.
The NAEd states that the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards for emerging scholars in education research. This year, the selection committee, composed of leading scholars across the field, selected just 35 fellows from a highly competitive pool of nearly 500 applicants.
Kairat is a Ph.D. candidate in the Gevirtz School’s Department of Education. Her dissertation titled, “Echoes of the Steppe, Transnational Dreams: Translanguaging Tongues, Transracial Lives, and the Making of Qazaqness in Los Angeles' Little Kazakhstan,” examines how multilingual Central Asian Kazakh children and youth navigate multilingual development, heritage language learnings, and transnational belonging.
“Receiving the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship is an incredible honor. I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Dr. Amy Kyratzis, and my committee members, Dr. Rebeca Mireles-Rios, Dr. Mary Bucholtz, and Dr. Kevin Whitehead, as well as my mentors, family, colleagues, and my home department, the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara, for their support and encouragement. I am especially grateful to the community members whose generous participation has made this dissertation project possible,” Kairat said.
“This recognition is especially meaningful because my dissertation is grounded in the lives, languages, and cultural practices of transnational Central Asian Kazakh communities in Southern California. Through this work, I hope to contribute to broader conversations on multilingual education, heritage language learning, and multiliteracies research, especially for transnational communities navigating histories of language shift, contemporary efforts toward language and cultural revalorization, and new forms of identity and belonging in the United States,” Kairat added.
“I chose GGSE because of its interdisciplinary strengths in fields of language, culture, development, and education, as well as the opportunity to work with faculty whose expertise closely aligned with my research interests,” she said. “The program has offered generous support for students’ intellectual growth, professional development, and scholarly engagement, and it has helped me grow as a researcher, teacher, and community-engaged scholar committed to multilingual and culturally sustaining education.”
The National Academy of Education, an honorary educational society, administers the fellowship with generous financial support from the Spencer Foundation. Since its founding, the fellowship has supported more than 400 scholars, including many who have gone on to become leading education researchers, faculty members, and intellectual leaders in the field.
Through this fellowship, the Academy seeks to strengthen the future of education research by supporting outstanding doctoral candidates whose work has the potential to make meaningful contributions to education scholarship, policy, and practice.