My research investigates the growing phenomenon of French Muslim “return” migration, in which an increasing number of young, born-in-French Muslims in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and fourth generation since their family’s migration to France are choosing to leave their country of birth and move to their family’s country of origin in North Africa. My research asks how this context of return migration affects the ways people understand themselves — including their identity, history, and relations to others — through and in relation to language. By approaching migration, not as a unidirectional movement towards Europe, but as a context of circuitous movements that link people living in North Africa, France, and elsewhere, my work calls into question the secular-modern assumption that living in a “developed” liberal democracy in Western Europe is always more desirable in terms of achieving a flourishing life.

My research is based on the idea that social life emerges out of interaction, and I take social interaction at both a linguistic and semiotic level as my primary site for analysis. I am interested in the ways subjectivity emerges from social interaction and in the ways assumptions about language play out in interaction in multilingual contexts where various varieties of French, Spanish, Arabic, and North-African indigenous languages, among others, are regularly used.

I conduct ethnographic research in Islamic communities in France, where my goal is to better understand the experiences of French Muslims in their own terms. My fieldwork is primarily based in smaller, more rural areas, and part of my research is an effort to understand the experiences of French Muslim outside of major urban centers that have been the primary focus of both popular and scholarly discourses on Islam in France.

My work examines the ways people define “the good” as well as how they strive to live in light of those moral/ethical projects. I am interested in how people engage in moral striving in light of structural constraints including Islamophobia and radicalization, situating ethical life in relation to existing moral frameworks and the workings of power. Of particular interest to me are the ways in which French Muslims draw on both Islamic and French Republican moral frameworks as they define what it means to be a good person and strive for that moral personhood. I am interested in the ways such an anthropology of the "good" opens space for hope and agency in contexts that also include oppression and overdetermination.