Captive Intelligence: Gender and Anti-Muslim Racism in the Making of Muslim Immigrant Informants in New York City
Wednesday March 6th 4PM - 5PM, Hart Hall Room 3201
In this research talk, Dr. Amir Aziz examines post-9/11 informant recruitment programs that have enlisted Muslim immigrants as counter-terrorism intelligence informants across the New York City metropolitan area. Dr. Aziz argues that federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI have particularly targeted Muslim immigrant women and gender non-normative Muslim immigrants of South-West Asian, South Asian, South-East Asian, and North African background with vulnerable immigration status. Agents ply them with false promises of immigration relief and employing deportation and removal threats to coax them into becoming compliant informants, claiming that their co-operation will help uncover domestic terror plots and deter ISIL radicalization efforts in the U.S. Dr. Aziz's talk will foreground the intersecting gendered/racialized dimensions of Muslim immigrants' experiences of informant recruitment—practices going strong more than 22 years after 9/11.
Amir Aziz is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Aziz is a filmmaker and scholar of gender, ethnic, and feminist studies, carceral studies, disability studies, and immigration, with focus on the United States and the South-West Asia and North Africa region.