I conduct my 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 research examines the ways French Muslims 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, situating agency 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.

My project approaches 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 research asks what it means for French Muslims to maintain connections to their places of origin through various means, including through virtual interactions, the exchange of goods, and trips between France and Northern Morocco. Through this work, I am interested in questions related to generational differences in migratory contexts, the entanglements of Moroccan, Amazigh, and French identity, and the growing movement in the academy to take the Mediterranean as a regional site of inquiry.

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 assumptions about language play out in interaction in multilingual contexts where various varieties of French, Arabic, and North-African indigenous languages, among others, are regularly used. I am also interested in the ways linguistic practices contribute to the emergence of particular kinds of personhood.