The Expert is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Lafayette College. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine.
Her areas of expertise include migration, citizenship, higher education, South Asian and Muslim diasporas, gender, labor, race, liberalism, political economy, and the state, in the Arabian Peninsula region and in the United States.
She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018). She has also published a co-authored book with Ahmed Kanna and Amelie Le Renard, Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Cornell University Press, 2020).
LGBTQ, Child abuse, Sexual abuse/assault, gender-based violence/domestic violence, forced marriage, trafficking, criminal deportees, likelihood of homelessness or destitution, Ethnic, religious, or tribal discrimination or persecution, torture/risk of political persecution/risk from state actors, risk from non-state actors, risk of retaliation, safe internal relocation, sufficiency of protection, Healthcare Access/Health systems capacity, HIV/ AIDS
The Expert has provided expertise in Saudi Arabia cases in the US.
Books:
2020. Beyond Exception: New Perspectives on the Arabian Peninsula, jointly authored with Ahmed Kanna and Amelie Le Renard. Cornell University Press.
2018. Teach for Arabia: American universities, liberalism, and transnational Qatar. Stanford University Press.
2013. Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Select articles:
2021. “Interrogating Race in Gulf Studies,” with Amelie Le Renard. POMEPS Studies 44: https://pomeps.org/pomeps-studies-44-racial-formations-in-africa-and-th…
2020. “Contestations of Imperial Citizenship: Student Protest and Organizing in Qatar’s Education City,” with Danya Al-Saleh. International Journal of Middle East Studies 52(4): 733-739.
2019. “Laboratories of liberalism: American higher education in the Arabian Peninsula and the discursive production of authoritarianism,” with Natalie Koch. Minerva. Published online July 2, 2019.
2018. “De-Exceptionalizing the Field: Anthropological Reflections on Migration, Labor, and Identity in Dubai,” with Ahmed Kanna, The Arab Studies Journal 26(2): 74-100.
2015. “Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking ethnocracy, kafala, and belonging in the GCC,” with Natalie Koch. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15(3): 540-552.
2015. “Is the University Universal? Mobile (Re)Constitutions of American Academia in the Gulf Arab States.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 46(1): 19-36.
2014. “Expat/Expert Camps: Redefining Labor within Gulf Migration” in Omar Al-Shehabi, Adam Hanieh, and Abdulhadi Khalaf, Eds. Transit States: Labour, Migration & Citizenship in the Gulf: 170-197. Pluto Press.