My scholarship brings together the study of international migration and race/ethnicity to learn how refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) navigate new worlds in North America. In 2018, I won the Province of Ontario's Early Researcher Award and secured over $489,000 in external grant funding to support this program of research.
Motivated by unresolved tensions in the scholarship on integration and racialization, my research program involves three streams of inquiry:
(1) My first project, on the racialization of Iranians in the U.S., includes a series of sole-authored peer-reviewed journal articles (with a fourth article currently under R&R) 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.
(2) In a second project, I am Principal Investigator and lead researcher on the RISE (Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity) Team. Funded by a major 2018-23 SSHRC Insight Grant, the RISE Team examines the wellbeing of Syrian newcomer mothers and their teenagers in the Toronto area (UofT Research Ethics Board Approval #33840). The RISE Team is a community- and team-based inquiry, which includes co-investigators Melissa Milkie and Ito Peng and 8 emerging researchers (graduate students, undergraduates, and newcomers to Canada). Our 5-year longitudinal project soft-launched in October 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 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.
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.
Motivated by unresolved tensions in the scholarship on integration and racialization, my research program involves three streams of inquiry:
(1) My first project, on the racialization of Iranians in the U.S., includes a series of sole-authored peer-reviewed journal articles (with a fourth article currently under R&R) 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.
(2) In a second project, I am Principal Investigator and lead researcher on the RISE (Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity) Team. Funded by a major 2018-23 SSHRC Insight Grant, the RISE Team examines the wellbeing of Syrian newcomer mothers and their teenagers in the Toronto area (UofT Research Ethics Board Approval #33840). The RISE Team is a community- and team-based inquiry, which includes co-investigators Melissa Milkie and Ito Peng and 8 emerging researchers (graduate students, undergraduates, and newcomers to Canada). Our 5-year longitudinal project soft-launched in October 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 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.
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.