Hajar Yazdiha

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Ford Foundation, 2022-2023
• Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Southern California, 2017-2018

Summary Statement of Research Interests

Hajar Yazdiha is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute and the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights. She is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Racial Justice Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights, and a Global Scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hajar researches the politics of inclusion and exclusion, examining the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures. 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, Time Magazine, BBC News, The Hill, and The Grio.

Dr. Yazdiha received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is a former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Turpanjian Postdoctoral Fellow of the Chair in Civil Society and Social Change.

More broadly, Dr. Yazdiha’s research examines the mechanisms underlying the politics of belonging as they shape intergroup boundaries, ethno-racial identities, and intergroup relations. This work crosses subfields of race and ethnicity, migration, social movements, culture, and law using mixed methods including interview, survey, historical, and computational text analysis.

Her multi-award winning book entitled, “The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights
Movement” (Princeton University Press) examines how a wide range of rivaling social movements across the political spectrum – from the Muslim Rights Movement to the Nativist Movement – deploy competing interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement to make claims around national identity and inclusion. Comparing how rival movements constituted by minority and majority groups with a range of identities — racial, gender, sexuality, religious, moral, political — battle over collective memory, the book documents how political action becomes directed toward divergent futures.

In other research projects, Dr. Yazdiha investigates these questions through three central lines of inquiry. A first strand of research explores how social exclusion is produced in macro-structures like laws, policies, and media. A second strand of research explores how and when groups develop perceptions of ‘groupness’ and collective identity in relation to these broader structures. A third strand of research investigates the collective behaviors that result from perceptions of groupness and their outcomes.

This research provides new insights into the relationship between macro-level institutional structures, meso-level group processes of collective identity formation and collective behavior, and micro-level perceptions, emotions, and mental health.

Through her research, Dr. Yazdiha works to understand how systems of inequality become entrenched and how groups develop strategies to resist, contest, and manifest alternative futures.

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. (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