In this talk Dr. Arshad I. Ali will explore how police surveillance programs impact the lives of young Muslims in the United States. Drawing upon five years of ethnographic research in Southern California and New York City, Dr. Ali will examine how the context of state surveillance altered and re-figured the way young Muslims understand their participation in community, political and social life. He will also discuss how young people use language to construct, re-imagine and re-figure lexicons of social practice and identity formation between racial, gender, and religious narratives of self.

Dr. Ali will elucidate how the figure of the Muslim helps develop a more robust discussion of racial otherness through examining intersectional formulations of Muslimness as an emergent racial identity. Through this research he will discuss local formations of Muslim identities and the ways macro political discourses and histories mediate the everyday practices of Muslim youth. As an example, he will consider the way the youth he worked with constructed the notion of ummah as a de-colonial challenge to national identity and traditional notions of race within the US cultural economy.