Linda Herrera

Linda Herrera is a social anthropologist with regional expertise in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with longstanding interests in  education and power, youth and generations, childhood in global context, and the social effects of technological change. Her work interrogates these topics through a wider lens of critical pedagogy and movements for participatory democracy. 

Linda Herrera received her PhD in Comparative and International Education from Columbia University, MA in Anthropology/Sociology from the American University in Cairo, and BA in Middle East Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at UIUC in 2011, she was Senior Lecturer in International Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam and convenor of the Children and Youth Studies specialization. Prior to that, she lived in Egypt for 17 years and worked in international development and social science research capacity programs for the MENA region. She has researched, written about, and taught courses on education and power in the MENA region, qualitative research methods (with a focus on critical ethnography and oral history), international development policy, youth and generations, childhood in global context, the social effects of technological change, and critical democracy and citizenship education.  She has served as an international education advisor in Egypt, and was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project (2019-2023). Her books (as single author, editor, and co-editor) include, Educating Egypt: Civic values and ideological struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the twenty-first century (University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the age of social media: The Egyptian popular insurrection and the internet (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth learning and activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being young and Muslim: New cultural politics in the global south and north (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab schooling: Critical ethnographies from Egypt (State University of New York Press, 2006). She has also curated the YouTube channels Critical Voices in Critical Times, Democracy Dialogue, and Education 2.0.