Andrabi draws on multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches to understand health disparities and experiences of race and Muslimness in the US. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Her dissertation examines the consequences of Muslimness at the intersection of race on health outcomes across the life course and the intergenerational transmission of health disparities among non-US born Muslims. Additionally, she explores American Muslims and perceived Muslimness as a site for understanding how race, immigration, and religion shape identity formation and the US racial order. Lastly, her work theorizes on the experiences of those who exist on the fringes of US racial categories and how to interrogate practices of conceptualizing, measuring, and analyzing race as a variable, particularly as they relate to health research.

Dr. Choudhury’s research surrounds American Muslim humor and the cultural politics that accompany what it means for Muslims to be socially legible in the United States. She is writing a book on how Islam and Muslims are articulated through the medium of standup comedy and the ways that they are recognized or become obscured through broader understandings of race, gender, and American secularism.

As an interdisciplinary feminist scholar of global racialization, her research engages with migration studies, digital media studies, and critical education studies through academic, public, and multimodal research in the U.S. and Pakistan.

Her talk, “The Imperial Optic: Migration, Racialization, and the War on Terror in Lahore and New York City”, focuses on the imperial optic as a conceptual orientation to study how college students in the US and Pakistan are racialized by war policies that shape how they access their college education. Focusing on Pakistani-origin students in NYC and Pashtun students in Lahore, this talk ethnographically illustrates how processes of imperial racialization occur across contexts shaped by US imperial geopolitics. This talk is based on my book project studying the impact of the US wars “on terror” on higher education and youth mobility in both Pakistan and the US.

Bilal’s work draws on over two years of ethnographic research in Greater Los Angeles, CA, to examine how South Asian American and Arab American Islamic scholars and pious youth draw on traditions of Islamic ethics to forge social movements in critique of racialized policing. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on this research tentatively titled, The LAboratory: Surveillance, Race, and Islam in the City of Angels. Some findings from this research have been published or are forthcoming in Anthropological Quarterly and Journal of Political Theology.

His talk explores the underlying anti-Muslim racial logics of contemporary American policing in urban centers like Los Angeles, CA, as well as the role of Muslims in ongoing struggles against surveillance and national security. The talk will consider how Muslims of immigrant backgrounds are increasingly turning to Islam as a decolonial ethical tradition to challenge white sovereignty in the City of Angels.

Prior to her appointment at USC, she taught at the University of Michigan for 13 years where she co-founded and served as the director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies, one of only three comparable programs in the world that focus on Arabs and/or Muslims in the U.S. context. She is the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (NYU Press, 2012) and of a forthcoming book, How Muslims Get Included in Diversity Politics (NYU Press). As a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media she co-authored the Obeidi-Alsultany Test to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims and serves as a consultant for Hollywood studios through the boutique firm, History Studio.