The Expert is an assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi. She has been conducting research in Afghanistan since 2009. The Expert’s main research in Afghanistan concerned ethnic Hazara civil society movements and the transmission of cultural trauma. Her earlier research in Afghanistan concerned Pashtun women who were working with Western NGOs. She has a PhD from the University of Connecticut in anthropology, an MA from Georgetown University in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies with a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Crises, and a BS in Russian Language and Literature from Georgetown University. Since 2016, She has been conducting research on the political identity of Afghan, mainly Hazara, refugees in Greece and Italy. She has also started projects concerning the Hazara genocide of the late 1800s, and sexual violence historically and currently experienced by Hazara women.
Prior to working in academia, The Expert was a high school teacher in South Los Angeles. She also worked for United States exchange programs in Russia, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and spent a summer teaching children at an organization in Nablus, West Bank.
LGBTQI issues; child abuse; sexual abuse/assault; gender-based violence/domestic violence; child soldiers, forced marriage; human trafficking; forced conscription/refoulment; Likelihood of destitution or homelessness; ethnic, religious, or tribal discrimination or persecution; forced conscription/refoulment; ex-combatant reintegration; land issues/land tenuredisputes; criminal deportees; risk of torture or political persecution; risk from state actors, risk from non-state actors; risk of retaliation; sufficiency of protection; possibility of safe internal relocation; healthcare access; health systems capacity; mental illness
The Expert has completed at least ten expert reports, since 2018, in a number of countries includingthe United States, UK, Canada, Australia, and various EU countries. They have also provided more informal consultations for the legal representatives of asylum seekers in these countries on numerous other occasions. They have offered testimony to the Parliaments of Canada and the United Kingdom on Hazara vulnerability in Afghanistan.
Individual Suffering and Collective Trauma Among Hazara Activists in Bamyan
Forthcoming
Iranian Studies
Afghan Refugees in Greece: Overcoming Traumatic Events and Postraumatic Growth.
Summer 2021.
In Pasha, Nausheen, ed., Toward a Positive Psychology of Islam and Muslims, Cham: Springer Nature.
Derrida’s Unconditional Hospitality as the Improbable: An Example of Innovation in Refugee Care
December 2020
Social Sciences Quarterly
Discursive Placemaking and Acts of Violence: The Dasht-e Barchi Neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan
Spring-Summer 2019
Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, Vol 48 No 1-2.
The Specter of the ‘Arrivant’: Hauntology of an Interethnic Conflict in Afghanistan
Co-authored with Andrea Chiovenda
December 2018
Asian Anthropology Vol 17 No 3.
Hazara Civil Society Activists and Local, National, and International Political Institutions
2018
In Shahrani, M. Nazif, ed. Identity and Politics in Modern Afghanistan: Forty Years of War and Rebellion, Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press.
Memory, History, and Landscape: Ethnic Hazaras’ Understanding of Marginality in Bamyan, Afghanistan
2015
In Kukreja, Sunil, ed. State, Society, and Minorities in South and Southeast Asia, Lanham: Lexington Books.
The Illumination of Marginality: How Ethnic Hazaras in Bamyan, Afghanistan Perceive the Lack of Electricity as Discrimination
December 2014
Central Asian Survey Vol. 33 No. 4.
Sacred Blasphemy: Global and Local Views of the Destruction of the Bamyan Buddha Statues in Afghanistan
November 2014
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs Vol. 34 No. 4.
Shi'a Muslims, Ismaili Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Sikhs in Afghanistan