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’s dissertation, “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,” Kairat said. “I am deeply grateful to my advisor, committee members, family, colleagues, and the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education for their support and encouragement.

“I am especially grateful to the community members whose generous participation has made this dissertation project possible.

“This fellowship is especially meaningful because it supports my dissertation on how heritage language, multi-literacies, and community-based education sustain identity and belonging across generations,” Kairat said.

“I am grateful to the Gevirtz School’s interdisciplinary and supportive intellectual community, which has helped me develop this work and grow as a researcher, teacher, and community-engaged scholar,” she said.

The National Academy of Education, an honorary educational society, administers the fellowship with 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