Research

Research Overview

Grounded in ethnographic methods, my research aims to further conceptualizations of migrant-targeted liberatory projects that emerge within settler colonial nation-states, with a focus on Australia and the United States. I am interested in the logics of belonging, community, and personhood such projects both rely upon and aim to reimagine. A common question that cuts across my research is how do settler colonial logics of cultural recognition and assimilation in tandem with migrants’ own transnational cultural ties structure post-war migrants’ conceptions of belonging and political participation?

Social Welfare, Citizenship, and Post-War Muslim Migrants

My interest in the governance of migrants was shaped by my first long-term ethnographic project, carried out across 14 months in 2015, and 2016-2017 with family violence prevention practitioners in Melbourne, Australia and its inner suburbs who were tasked with carrying out a new forced marriage prevention policy targeted toward Muslim migrant communities. In my book titled Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare (currently under contract), I focus on bringing to light the moral and ethical dilemmas confronted by prevention workers as they attempted to care for migrant communities, while also engaging in risk assessment, profiling, and representational practices that governed their intimate familial relations in new ways. The research reveals how biopolitical welfare reads migrant sociality in terms of good or bad citizenship and produces the world in the image of liberalism’s illusory ideals.

Migrant Diasporas, Activism, and Decolonial Futures in Australia and the US 

My current research, Unsettling the Future: Afghan Diasporic Politics in the United States and Australia, is an ethnographic and historical study of Afghan American and Afghan Australian diasporic activism over the past twenty years. While Afghanistan has occupied the global political and cultural imaginary since the beginning of the Global War on Terror, Afghan diasporic experiences have largely been dismissed in the social sciences. The project will examine how both diasporas imagine decolonial futures in both their countries of settlement and the homeland. Both Afghan American and Afghan Australian anti-war and refugee rights activism has been deeply shaped by immigrant rights movements in the US and Indigenous sovereignty movements in Australia. This study aims to build on conversations at the intersection of diasporic activism, empire, and settler colonialism, through thinking about how diasporas of empire that sit at the center of two settler colonial states co-imagine liberatory futures with other marginalized groups.

Extraterritorial Sovereignty in Australian Offshore Detention

My research in Australia has also formed the basis for a short-term project I conducted from 2017 to 2020 on migrant literature and media that emerged out of Australian offshore detention centers on Manus Island and Nauru. The project sought to understand how detained asylum seekers themselves theorized detention’s logics of carceral confinement. It examined shifting logics of Australian extraterritorial sovereignty, the outsourcing of violence to resource poor islands, and the increasingly diffuse nature of border control. It also examined the ways in which migrants, such as Behrouz Boochani and Abdul Aziz Muhamat—now two globally renowned activists—theorized the operative logics of detention through the state’s monitoring of both migrant mobility and Indigenous detention center workers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

Relational Histories of Migrant Governance: The US and Australia

I am currently working on developing a long-term archival project that traces the history of Australian and US approaches to migrant governance, including their ongoing collaborations around border control and Indigenous policing. Through this project, I hope to contribute to a growing body of scholarship that thinks about settler colonialism, border making, sovereignty, and Indigeneity as always already a transnational project anchored in the historical exchange of ideas about settler sovereignty.