Congratulations to PhD student Maleeha Iqbal for winning the Edward Herberg Fellowship for her research project Understanding Transnational Identity Formation Amidst Global Islamophobia: The Case of Muslims in Canada and Pakistan. The Herberg fellowship supports graduate students pursuing research in the area of Canadian ethnoracial-religious communities, including research on topics such as community structure, cultural maintenance, and socioeconomic inequality within or between communities. Iqbal’s dissertation proposal seeks to unravel the transnational journey of Islamophobic narratives through a range of qualitative methodologies. Her proposal builds on her previous work with Dr. Neda Maghbouleh and Dr. Tahseen Shams, where she gained experience interviewing and writing about Syrian refugees and Muslim South Asian immigrants in Canada.
Maleeha Iqbal is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her research is motivated by problems at the intersection of Race and Ethnicity, Global Migration, and Islamophobia. More specifically, Maleeha's research investigates how Islamophobia is experienced and challenged in different national environments; how identity-making is shaped by geopolitical contexts; and how collective, transnational identities are formed. She has a specific interest in groups from South Asia and the MENA region. Maleeha's research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS).