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 research is supported 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).
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) 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.
(2) In a second project, 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.
(3) A third major project, fielded with sociologists Ariela Schachter and René Flores in July 2018, asks: what are the rules governing ethnoracial classification today? To adjudicate this longstanding question, we conduct a large-scale conjoint survey experiment to understand how everyday people in the U.S. categorize hypothetical others across various potential dimensions of ethnic and racial difference, including primes for MENA heritage. Our first papers from this project are currently under review.
Together, my projects cut strategically across class, ethnicity, and citizenship differences to understand the broader social forces that racialize MENA communities 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.
This research is supported 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).
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) 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.
(2) In a second project, 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.
(3) A third major project, fielded with sociologists Ariela Schachter and René Flores in July 2018, asks: what are the rules governing ethnoracial classification today? To adjudicate this longstanding question, we conduct a large-scale conjoint survey experiment to understand how everyday people in the U.S. categorize hypothetical others across various potential dimensions of ethnic and racial difference, including primes for MENA heritage. Our first papers from this project are currently under review.
Together, my projects cut strategically across class, ethnicity, and citizenship differences to understand the broader social forces that racialize MENA communities 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.