Research

No Dignity in Captivity: Detention, (Dis)ability, and Abolition Futures in America's War Within

In my first book project, I explore how Asian Muslim migrant women and Asian Muslims of marginalized gender/sexual identities -- particularly those of Arab, South-West Asian, South Asian, and South-East Asian background -- face gendered-racialized forms of disablement, deprivation, and violences under confinement conditions in the U.S. Those detained by ICE and under surveillance by the FBI and U.S. domestic intelligence agencies, for instance, endure forms of violence that include women’s forced unveiling, psychiatric seclusion, and solitary confinement.

Such punitive domestic practices of confinement and migrant detention within the U.S. are deeply enmeshed in a global nexus of intersecting anti-Asian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racisms.

This book project grew from my own involvement in various immigration justice and feminist- and queer-of-color abolitionist groups that began almost a decade ago in 2015. My advocacy work is rooted in supporting various BIPOC communities, with particular focus on South-West Asian, South Asian, South-East Asian, and trans- and queer-of- color immigrants. I advocated for releasing detained migrants in California, New Jersey, and New York provided linguistic and cultural translation services for detained immigrants held by ICE, translating Arabic, Malay/Indonesian, and French into English for those who needed the support.

In one of the book's chapters, I examine post-9/11 informancy programs that have enlisted 'vulnerable' Muslim migrants as counter-terrorism intelligence informants to infiltrate mosques and Arab, South-West Asian, and South Asian Muslim community spaces across New Jersey and New York City. I show how federal agencies like ICE and the FBI have targeted Muslim migrants with vulnerable immigration status, plying them with falsified promises of immigration relief and employing deportation threats to coax them into becoming informants.

The work addresses a dearth in scholarship on the gendered dimensions of anti-Muslim, anti-Asian state surveillance: The use of family separation and migrant detention, a central tactic in counter-terrorism informancy, is a deeply gendered method of coercion that disproportionately impacts and criminalizes Asian Muslim migrant women and queer/trans Muslim migrants in distinct ways.

I am also interested in challenging theoretical and political efforts that attempt to disaggregate anti-Asian racisms from anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racisms -- which runs contrary to both the realities of Asian and Asian American Muslims and the complexities of racial formation in the U.S. I build upon the works by scholars like Sunaina Maira, Evelyn Alsultany, Soham Patel, and Nour Joudah who have critically highlighted how South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) Studies and South Asian Studies have always been integral to the field broadly called Asian American Studies.

Debility, Disablement, and Toxic Entanglements in America's Perpetual War

I am in the midst of preliminary research for a second book project. In this work, I am interested in the toxic material and affective afterlives of U.S. empire and military occupation in contemporary Afghanistan and South-West and South Asia. Drawing from Ethnic studies, Disability studies, Affect and Queer theory, and Animal studies, I look at how military burn pits, landmines, and toxic chemicals left behind by U.S. occupation forces have not only debilitated Afghan lives but devitalized Afghanistan’s biodiverse landscape, affecting soil, farmland, air, water, climate, and non-human ecosystems and species.

From the debilitating chemical and radioactive toxicities left in Afghanistan to the mass disablement of civilians in Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen as a result of Global North military occupation across Asia, I aim to challenge the dominance of liberal disability rights frameworks rooted in the individual rights-bearing subject, building upon the works of scholars like Jasbir Puar, Helen Meekosha, and Helga Tawil-Souri.

The project examines how Anglo-European-centric theories and political conceptions of disability — privileging the white, disabled body of the Global North hailed through a neoliberal politics of recognition — spectacularly fail to capture how racialized populations in occupation- and war-zones in South-West and South Asia encounter debilitation and disablement through processes of militarized occupation, settler colonial violence, and racialized subjugation illegible to Western liberal disability rights frameworks.

In doing so, the book project aims to account for the material

and affective afterlives of nuclear, ecological, and chemical toxicities impressed upon the human body and other-than-human ecosystems as a result of empire. It develops a decolonial materialist and transnational analysis of impairment and challenges Disability studies frameworks that occlude the geopolitical production of impairment and disability.