أمير عزيز
Research
No Dignity in Captivity​​: Detention, (Dis)ability, and Abolition Futures in America's War Within
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In my first book project, I explore how SWANA, Arab and Muslim migrant women and those of marginalized gender/sexual identities 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.​​​​​​
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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.
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​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-Arab 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 SWANA, Arab and Muslim migrant women and queer/trans refugees and 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.