About Me

I am a scholar, educator, and filmmaker based in the Bay Area, California, where I am currently a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I hold a Ph.D. in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University - New Brunswick.

Fluent in five languages, including Arabic, French, and Malay, I am interested in Arab American and Asian American, racialized queer/trans, and undocumented migrant histories, politics, and diasporas and how those communities utilize creative, digital, and new media technologies, creating a mosaic of 'digital diasporas,' to resist settler-colonial and racialized-gendered projects of securitization and surveillance.

My scholarship includes work in Arab American and Asian American studies; Decolonial feminisms; Cultural and media studies; Secularism and religion; Carceral studies; Disability studies; Migration studies; and Comparative settler colonialisms. My research and teaching focus spans the United States, South-West Asia & North Africa (SWANA), and Maritime/Pacific South-East Asia (the Malay-Muslim world), with particular interest in the settler-colonial contexts of Algeria, Palestine, and Kanaky/New Caledonia.

The book examines how 'War on Terror' practices of surveillance, detention, and informancy have impacted Muslim immigrant women and gender non-normative individuals, particularly those of Arab, South/South-East Asian, and South-West Asian background, and the gendered-racialized forms of disablement, deprivation, and violence that they encounter.

particularly on the longstanding anti-imperial feminist solidarities and decolonial imaginaries between South-West Asian, South-East Asian, South Asian, and Pacific Islander American communities.

As an activist-scholar and immigrant with roots in social movements against migrant detention in New Jersey, New York, California, and France, I am deeply informed by decolonial and feminist-abolitionist methodologies that critically interrogate the liberal-carceral violences of borders, checkpoints, deportation, and immigration enforcement.

My research and talks have been supported by the Mary S. Hartman Fellowship in Women's & Gender Studies, the Rutgers Center for African Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights & Justice, and my writings have been featured in forums such as the Middle East Research & Information Project and Jadaliyya.

Over the course of my teaching, I have taught over 17 undergraduate courses, as the sole and primary instructor, in the fields of Ethnic Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Queer and Trans Studies, Asian American Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies.

In 2023, I received the Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education award by Rutgers University's School of Arts and Sciences, in recognition of teaching and mentorship excellence in Prison Abolition; Feminist Theory; and Gender, Ethnicity, Representation across six years.

I am at work on my first book project on the increasing digitization of the U.S. surveillance-and-detention industrial complex and U.S. empire's expanding geographies of violence and military imperialism in Asia and the Pacific, drawing from fields such as Ethnic studies, Feminist theory, Asia American Studies, Settler colonialism studies, and Critical disability studies.

As a filmmaker, I am directing a documentary film on a Guantánamo survivor's quest for justice, offering an intimate look into the devastating personal costs of the so-called U.S. 'War on Terror' that has disproportionately marked racialized Global South populations, especially Arab, South-West/South Asian, and Muslim communities, for militarized occupation and death.

I am especially interested in the pedagogies and methodologies of possibility between South-West Asia & North Africa (SWANA) Studies and Asian American Studies,

My course offerings include Prison Abolition; Gender, Ethnicity, Representation; Feminist Theory; and Introduction to Gender, Race, Sexuality; as well as specialized courses such as Introduction to Arab American Studies; Comparative South Asian & West Asian American Literatures and Films; Transfeminist & Queer Asian America; Queer & Trans Ethnic Studies; Islam in America; Feminist & Queer Disability Studies; and Theorizing Settler Colonialism.