USC.edu

Hajar Yazdiha

Associate Professor of Sociology
Hajar Yazdiha
Email hyazdiha@usc.edu Office Phone (213) 740-3533

Research & Practice Areas

Social Movements, Race and Ethnicity, Immigration, Culture, Law and Society, Political Sociology, Collective Memory, Imagined Futures

Center, Institute & Lab Affiliations

  • Equity Research Institute,

Biography

Hajar Yazdiha is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute, USC Black Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights. She is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a former Racial Justice Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights, Global Scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Ford Fellow. Dr. Yazdiha received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill after which she was a Turpanjian Postdoctoral Fellow of the Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at USC. 

Hajar researches the politics of belonging, examining the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures. This work crosses subfields of race and ethnicity, migration, social movements, culture, memory studies, and law using mixed methods including interview, survey, historical, and computational text analysis. 

In addition to award-winning articles, she is author of the book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement with Princeton University Press. She is also a public scholar whose writing and research has been featured in outlets including The LA Times, NPR, Time Magazine, BBC News, The Guardian, The Hill, and The Grio.

Education

  • Ph.D. Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2017
  • M.A. Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2013
  • B.A. English, University of Virginia
    • Postdoctoral Fellow, Ford Foundation, 2022-2023
    • Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Southern California, 2017-2018

  • Research Keywords

    Social Movements, Race and Ethnicity, Immigration, Culture, Law and Society, Political Sociology, Collective Memory, Imagined Futures

    Research Specialties

    Social Movements, Race and Ethnicity, Immigration, Culture, Law and Society, Political Sociology, Collective Memory, Imagined Futures

  • Book

    • Yazdiha, H. (2023). The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton University Press. Order here

    Journal Article

    • Yazdiha, H. (2025). A Du Boisian Theory of Memory: Truth-telling Legacies of Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction as Decolonized Theory, Method, and Praxis. Sociological Forum.
    • Yazdiha, H., Boen, C. (2025). The affective strategies of White unknowing: how police violence reveals the expression of racialized emotions on Twitter. Social Forces.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2023). The Relational Politics of Racialized Policing: Community Policing for Counterterrorism, Suspect Communities, and Muslim Immigrants’ Provisional Belonging. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2022). Racialized Organizations in Racialized Space: How Socio-spatial Divisions Activate Symbolic Boundaries in a Charter School and a Public School. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2022). Building and Wedging Strategic Alliances: Racial Framing Contests in the Immigrant Rights and Nativist Counter-Movements. American Behavioral Scientist.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2021). Toward a Du Boisian Framework of Immigrant Incorporation: Racialized Contexts, Relational Identities, and Muslim American Collective Action. Social Problems. Vol. 68 (2), pp. 300-320.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2020). An Intersectional Theory of Strategic Action: Socially-Located Memories and the Challenge of Muslim Mobilization Against Police. Mobilization. Vol. 25 (4), pp. 475-492.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2020). All the Muslims Fit to Print: Racial Frames as Mechanisms of Muslim Ethnoracial Formation in the New York Times from 1992-2010. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
    • Yazdiha, H., Council, L., Johnson, C., Santellano, K. (2020). Linking Contexts, Intersectionality, and Generations: Toward a Multidimensional Theory of Millennials and Social Change. Sociological Perspectives.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2019). Exclusion through acculturation? Comparing first- and second-generation European Muslims’ perceptions of discrimination across four national contexts. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol. 42 (5), pp. 782-800.
    • Yazdiha, H. (2017). The relationality of law and culture: Dominant approaches and new directions for cultural sociologists. Sociology Compass. Vol. 11 (12)
    • Yazdiha, H., Kurzman, C., Kamal, A. (2017). Ideology and Threat Assessment: Law Enforcement Evaluation of Muslim and Right-Wing Extremism. Socius. Vol. 3
    • Yazdiha, H. (2014). Law as Movement Strategy: How the Islamophobia Movement Institutionalizes Fear Through Legislation. Social Movement Studies. Vol. 13 (2)
    • Yazdiha, H. (2010). Conceptualizing Hybridity: Deconstructing Boundaries through the Hybrid. Formations: The Graduate Center Journal of Social Research. Vol. 1
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