I am a sociologist of race, migration, and culture with a particular interest in legal & cultural citizenship in the (intergenerational) experience of immigrant families.

Why do some immigrants feel pressured to conform with certain norms? What does it mean to belong—culturally and legally? How does that change from one generation to next? And what does that tell us about the politics of race, nation, and culture?

In my current main project, I focus on people’s lived experiences of assimilationism—racialized pressures to conform with dominant cultural norms. I investigate immigrants’ experiences with cultural transmission (how foreign-born parents pass on cultural markers and practices, how children receive them), and how they are shaped by race in the United States and France. This project uses in-depth interviews with immigrant parents, their teenage children, and their teachers in the Chicago and Paris metropolitan areas.

In an article published recently in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Yannick Coenders and I use my interview data to analyze how assimilationism leads to the denial of everyday racism. We argue that processes of 1) responsibilization for nonwhites’ own marginalization and 2) pedagogy of disavowal characterize racialized assimilationism—from the Netherlands and France to the United States.

In addition to several articles currently in the pipeline, I am working on a book manuscript: The False Promises of Assimilation: How Immigrant Families Experience the Everyday Politics of Race and Belonging in the US and France. Ultimately, the book proposes to take a critical look at commonplace notions of “assimilation”—starting from immigrant families’ perspectives—to understand how they contribute to the everyday politics of race.

I am also contributing to the study of cultural capital as racialized and gendered in France, with a quantitative analysis of Education Ministry data. This work is published in Sociology of Education and Poetics.

In former research, I studied French citizenship law and older immigrants’ naturalization practices. A paper is currently under review for a special issue on imperial citizenship after empire.