Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Muslims and the Global War on Terror: How the Racialization of Muslims Justifies the Expansion of Policing and Surveillance

Saher Selod, Director of Research for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding

Dr. Selod will discuss her most recent co-authored book, A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st-Century Racism,  published on Polity Press in 2024. The book examines how Muslims experience racialization on a global scale. With special attention paid to the United States, China, India, and the United Kingdom, the authors examine both the unique national contexts and – crucially – the shared characteristics of anti-Muslim racism. In this presentation she will discuss how a range of counterterrorism policies, from hyper-surveillance to racialized policing, and the ensuing representation of Islam, have worked across borders to justify and institutionalize an acceptable, state-sponsored face of racism against Muslims.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. This program is part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Saher Selod is the current director of research for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. She was formerly an associate professor and previous chair of the Department of Sociology at Simmons University in Boston, MA. Her research expertise centers on the experiences of Muslims with surveillance. In her first book Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press 2018) examines how Muslim men and Muslim women experience gendered forms of racialization through their hyper surveillance because of the War on Terror. Her co-authored second book, A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and Twenty-First Century Racism (Polity Press 2024) examines how the Global War on Terror has justified the detention, imprisonment, and hyper surveillance of Muslims in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and China.