Professor Arshad Ali, from George Washington University, will be joining us on March 5th to speak about his research, which explores how  marginalized young people make sense of their own identity and agency in an era in which state-sanctioned surveillance is part of their lives. 

His talk is titled “Citizens Under Suspicion: Responsive Research with Community Under Surveillance”

Date: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Time: 6:00-7:30p
Room: 306 Russell

Light refreshments will be served.

Fireside Chat with Dr. Ali for graduate students:
4:30-5:30p
104B Russell

Please note: The fireside chat will take place in a different room than the talk.

In the 14 years since the 9/11 events, this nation as a whole, and New York City in particular, has escalated its state-sanctioned surveillance in the lives and activities of Muslims in the United States. In this talk, Dr. Ali will explores the ramifications of police infiltration and monitoring of Muslim student and community-based organizations. Drawing upon 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork among multiple research sites with Muslim youth in New York City, he examines  how surveillance affected the relationships within communities utilizing notions of power, panoptic gaze and governmentality. Throughout the participatory action ethnographic study he found that an insidious result of the New York Police Department’s Demographics Unit has been the alarming rise of self-discipline behaviors amid a culture of fear and panoptic gaze, as well as diminished intercommunity trust and sense of solidarity among these youth themselves. Through the participatory action research process of data collection and analysis, these findings point to a need to reconfigure the roles and responsibilities of a social researcher.