My scholarship brings together the study of international migration and race to learn how refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) navigate new worlds in North America. This work is primarily underwritten by two major external awards for which I am Principal Investigator: the 2018-2023 Province of Ontario's Early Researcher Award ($140,000) and a 2018-2023 SSHRC Insight Grant ($349,000; extended through March 2024).
Motivated by unresolved tensions in the scholarship on integration, racialization, and anti-Muslim racism in the U.S. and Canada, my research program involves three streams of inquiry:
(1) I am Principal Investigator and lead faculty researcher on the RISE (Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity) Team. Funded by a major 2018-23 SSHRC Insight Grant, RISE Team examines the wellbeing of Syrian newcomer mothers and their teenagers in the Toronto area (UofT Research Ethics Board Approval #36434). RISE Team is a community- and team-based inquiry, which includes faculty co-investigators Melissa Milkie and Ito Peng, Postdoctoral Fellow Rula Kahil, and 10 research assistants (graduate students, undergraduates, and newcomers to Canada). Our 5-year longitudinal project launched in Fall 2018, is conducted entirely in Arabic, and builds on a pilot study we conducted in 2016-2017, through an award from SSHRC and the federal Ministry of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship. Our first papers from this project are published in A National Project (McGill-Queens University Press), Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies.
(2) A second major stream is fielded with sociologists Ariela Schachter and René Flores and asks: what are the rules governing ethnoracial classification and group boundaries today? To adjudicate these longstanding questions, we have designed and conducted a series of conjoint survey experiments to understand how everyday people in the U.S. perceive hypothetical others across various dimensions of potential difference. Our first paper (2021) from this project is published at American Journal of Sociology and co-won the 2022 Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award from the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Our second paper (2022), which used new experiments on external classification and self-identity to analyze MENA as an emergent identity category in the U.S., is published at PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and was presented to the US Census Bureau as part of the 2022 Summer at Census program.
(3) My first project, on the racialization of Iranians in the U.S., includes four sole-authored peer-reviewed journal articles and a sole-authored book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race, published September 2017 with Stanford University Press. The book won Honorable Mention (Sociology) in the 2018 PROSE Awards, the Association of American Publishers' annual award for best scholarly book, and Honorable Mention for Best Book from the ASA Section on International Migration in 2019. The book has been adapted by others into community events, reading groups, and original poetry.
Together, my projects cut strategically across class, ethnicity, and citizenship differences to understand the broader social forces that racialize people as white/not-white, welcome/unwelcome, compatible/incompatible, and invisible/hypervisible in the Canadian and American polity. By interrogating how complex identities are trafficked across borders and categories, this research contributes to policy efforts meant to create more inclusive, healthy and just societies.
Motivated by unresolved tensions in the scholarship on integration, racialization, and anti-Muslim racism in the U.S. and Canada, my research program involves three streams of inquiry:
(1) I am Principal Investigator and lead faculty researcher on the RISE (Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity) Team. Funded by a major 2018-23 SSHRC Insight Grant, RISE Team examines the wellbeing of Syrian newcomer mothers and their teenagers in the Toronto area (UofT Research Ethics Board Approval #36434). RISE Team is a community- and team-based inquiry, which includes faculty co-investigators Melissa Milkie and Ito Peng, Postdoctoral Fellow Rula Kahil, and 10 research assistants (graduate students, undergraduates, and newcomers to Canada). Our 5-year longitudinal project launched in Fall 2018, is conducted entirely in Arabic, and builds on a pilot study we conducted in 2016-2017, through an award from SSHRC and the federal Ministry of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship. Our first papers from this project are published in A National Project (McGill-Queens University Press), Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies.
(2) A second major stream is fielded with sociologists Ariela Schachter and René Flores and asks: what are the rules governing ethnoracial classification and group boundaries today? To adjudicate these longstanding questions, we have designed and conducted a series of conjoint survey experiments to understand how everyday people in the U.S. perceive hypothetical others across various dimensions of potential difference. Our first paper (2021) from this project is published at American Journal of Sociology and co-won the 2022 Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award from the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Our second paper (2022), which used new experiments on external classification and self-identity to analyze MENA as an emergent identity category in the U.S., is published at PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and was presented to the US Census Bureau as part of the 2022 Summer at Census program.
(3) My first project, on the racialization of Iranians in the U.S., includes four sole-authored peer-reviewed journal articles and a sole-authored book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race, published September 2017 with Stanford University Press. The book won Honorable Mention (Sociology) in the 2018 PROSE Awards, the Association of American Publishers' annual award for best scholarly book, and Honorable Mention for Best Book from the ASA Section on International Migration in 2019. The book has been adapted by others into community events, reading groups, and original poetry.
Together, my projects cut strategically across class, ethnicity, and citizenship differences to understand the broader social forces that racialize people as white/not-white, welcome/unwelcome, compatible/incompatible, and invisible/hypervisible in the Canadian and American polity. By interrogating how complex identities are trafficked across borders and categories, this research contributes to policy efforts meant to create more inclusive, healthy and just societies.