April 4 Tuesday, 4:30pm | Online
In the U.S., people of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent are counted as White and do not hold minoritized status, a federal statistical policy that is currently under review. But even when not officially sanctioned by the state, grassroots ideas about race/ethnicity categories can be a powerful force in their social construction and transformation. In her 2017 book The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press), Neda Maghbouleh drew on ethnography, life history interviews, and archival materials to show how an invisibilized MENA community relates to prevailing American race/ethnicity standards. In the years since, she has published a series of papers that tested humanistic insights from Limits of Whiteness using quantitative methods. Each approach has enabled a different set of scholarly and social impacts, illuminating possible answers to the MENA question—and the promises and challenges of transdisciplinary work more generally.
Neda Maghbouleh is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Migration, Race, and Identity at the University of Toronto. Her 2017 book, The Limits of Whiteness, received honors from the Association of American Publishers and the American Sociological Association. She and two collaborators, Ariela Schachter and Rene Flores, are the most recent winners of the American Sociological Association’s Oliver Cromwell Cox prize for their article “Ancestry, Color, or Culture: How Whites Racially Classify Others in the U.S.” Their latest collaboration, “MENA Americans may not be
perceived, nor perceive themselves to be White” was published in February 2022 in PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Neda has provided guidance on race and ethnicity categories to organizations like the U.S. Census Bureau, American Medical Association, and Spencer Foundation.
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