The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race

In this talk, based on her book The Limits of Whiteness (2017, Stanford University Press), sociologist Neda Maghbouleh shares the curious, under-theorized story of how Iranian Americans move across a white/not-white color line. By contextualizing ethnographic data with neglected legal and archival evidence, she offers new sight-lines into how a “white” American immigrant group can become “brown” and what such a transformation says about race in North America today.

Born in New York City and raised in Portland, Oregon, Neda Maghbouleh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research addresses the everyday lives of racialized people, including a new study of Syrian refugees in Toronto, funded by SSHRC and the Government of Canada, Ministry of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship.