My research
My research investigates how the modern state deploys race as a technology of power – how governments create, classify and manage populations through law, bureaucracy, and policy. I study race not as identity, but as a set of administrative and legal practices that organise political membership, regulate dissent, and distribute rights and burdens. This approach brings into view the everyday “machinery” of racial ordering – through naturalisation rules, civil rights enforcement, census standards, security protocols – and the political struggles that contest them.
My project
My dissertation examines how Arab Americans have been racialised through U.S. law and bureaucracy across the twentieth century. Through extensive archival research, I show how courts, civil rights agencies, and census institutions shaped Arab Americans’ shifting position as “white”, highlighting how state power and classification practices—not just cultural representations—defined their place in the American racial order.
