Publications 2000-2009 by Louise Cainkar
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increas... more The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increased scholarship on American Muslims. In the social sciences, this work has focused mainly on Arabs and South
Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on
Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or
South Asians. Rather, the authors highlight a preexisting, racializing war on terror and a more complex history of these groups with race both globally and domestically. Islamophobia is a popular term used to
talk about Muslim encounters with discrimination, but the concept lacks a clear understanding of race and structural racism. Newer frameworks have emerged situating Muslim experiences within race scholarship.
The authors conclude with a call to scholars to embark on studies that fill major gaps in this emerging field of study—such as intersectional approaches that incorporate gender, communities of belonging, black
Muslim experiences, class, and sexuality—and to remain conscious of the global dimensions of this racial project.
Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty …, 2002
J. Islamic L. & Culture, 2002
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the …, 2004
Using Sociological Theory to Defuse Anti-Arab/Muslim Nativism and Accelerate Social Integration
Journal of Applied Social Science, 2007
Abstract For three days after the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of angry suburbanites gathered to surrou... more Abstract For three days after the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of angry suburbanites gathered to surround and lay siege to the bounded neighborhood hosting the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois. I concluded from a two and one-half year ethnographic study of the post-9/11 experience of Arab Muslims in metropolitan Chicago that the underlying sociological conditions giving rise to these post-9/11 events were racialized and nativist understandings held by a significant proportion of southwest suburban whites that positioned Arab and ...
City & Society, 2005
Organizing a photographic social history in a way that captures your viewers' imaginations and co... more Organizing a photographic social history in a way that captures your viewers' imaginations and convinces them of your argument is fraught with challenges. 1 One is limited by the photos one has to work with and their capacity to project larger themes. Some themes are difficult to portray visually because they concern protracted processes, such as racialization. Some actions were simply not caught on film, such as women wearing hijab (headscarves) being spit upon.
The impact of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States
GSC Quarterly, 2004
Arab American Encyclopedia, ACCESS, Anan Ameri and Dawn Ramey, eds., 2000
Published in 2000, this is a largely quantitative profile of the 100+ year history of Arab immigr... more Published in 2000, this is a largely quantitative profile of the 100+ year history of Arab immigration to the US set in the context of changing US immigration policies that affected its ebb and flow. It provides numbers and some socio-economic and locational detail for each of the largest Arab immigrant groups: Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians/Jordanians, Yemenis, Egyptians and Iraqis/Chaldeans/Assyrians.
Publications from the 1990's by Louise Cainkar
A Critique of the U.S. State Department's 1986 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in the 1967 Israeli-Occupied Palestinian Territories
Journal of Palestine Studies, 1987
... Occupied Palestinian Territories Louise Cainkar and Jan Abu-Shakrah* ... Louise Cainkar is th... more ... Occupied Palestinian Territories Louise Cainkar and Jan Abu-Shakrah* ... Louise Cainkar is the director of the Chicago Office of the DataBase Project on Palestinian Human Rights. Jan Abu-Shakrah is the director of the Palestine Human Rights Information Center (Arab ...
The Palestinian intifada December 9, 1987–December 8, 1988: A Record of israeli Repression. Edited by M. Cherif Bassiouni and Louise Cainkar. [Chicago: DataBase Project on Palestinian Human Rights. 1989. x + 234 pp.]
International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 1989
Book Review: Culture, Class, and Work Among Arab American Women
Work and Occupations, 2005
Barley and Kunda have contributed a great deal to our understanding of one form of contingent lab... more Barley and Kunda have contributed a great deal to our understanding of one form of contingent labor, and their book will be appreciated by practitioners—contractors and hiring managers—who can draw useful lessons from it, and academic readers, who will find a fine ethnographic study of this important method of work organization.
Arab studies quarterly, 1993
The Development of Arab American Identity, Ernest McCarus, ed., 1994
An ethnographically-based social class analysis of Palestinian women living in the US in the 1980... more An ethnographically-based social class analysis of Palestinian women living in the US in the 1980's, especially in how they enact womanhood and Palestinianness in a US society generally hostile to their narrative and aspirations. Also notes variations in migration patterns and gendered differences. This paper was written prior to the scholarly rise of notions of racialization, transnationalism, and intersectionality, and in the nascence of post-colonial studies, yet one can easily see how these analytics would apply. It also glimpses an emerging Islamic revival, using the word "fundamentalist" [a word I wish I could change]. The ethnographic detail is sound; the writing is a product of its time.
Family and Gender Among American Muslims: Issues Facing Middle Eastern Immigrants and Their Children, Barbara Aswad and Barbara Bilge, eds., 1996
The paper highlights the ways in which gender and politics [Palestinian statelessness; US support... more The paper highlights the ways in which gender and politics [Palestinian statelessness; US support for Zionism and deprecation of Palestinians] intersect among Palestinians in Chicago. Based on life history interviews with Palestinian women, it narrates the primary ways in which these women chose to evaluate their lives as women. They compare them to their mothers, to Palestinian men, to American women, and to people who have a country. Overall, they see that they have more power than their mothers and less than Palestinian men. They feel there was less gender inequality in Palestine because both men and women had social expectations placed upon their behavior; not so in the US. They see positives and negatives for US women, would not trade places with them, and detest the stereotypes of Arab women existing in US culture. Finally, they speak eloquently about how statelessness and violence impacts their daily lives, even while living in the US, and about the tentativeness of their lives in exile. If I wrote this paper today, I'd frame it differently, using notions of race, empire, intersectionality, and transnationalism. Yet the substance of the women's narratives remains the same.
Books by Louise Cainkar
Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience after 9/11
Introduction he title for this book emerged from research data showing that during the three year... more Introduction he title for this book emerged from research data showing that during the three years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, JL a majority of Arab Muslim Americans reported feeling unsafe and insecure in the United States. 1 This sense of insecurity, which was not only articulated in narratives but was palpable, was an outcome of their treatment by the American government and some members of the American public and by portrayals of them in the mainstream American media, which proffered constructions of reality that ...
Papers by Louise Cainkar
Contemporary Sociology, Jun 28, 2021
Palestinian women in American society
Racial control under the guise of terror threat: policing of US Muslim, Arab, and SWANA communities
Critical Studies on Terrorism, Jan 2, 2023
Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit by Alisa Perkins
The Michigan historical review, Sep 1, 2022
Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement
Contemporary Sociology, Sep 1, 1994
This study explores the role of politically active Palestinian women in the Lebanese Resistance M... more This study explores the role of politically active Palestinian women in the Lebanese Resistance Movement. The author describes the types of work involved, the organizations these women have founded, and the changing nature of gender roles set against an intense and sustained crisis.
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Publications 2000-2009 by Louise Cainkar
Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on
Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or
South Asians. Rather, the authors highlight a preexisting, racializing war on terror and a more complex history of these groups with race both globally and domestically. Islamophobia is a popular term used to
talk about Muslim encounters with discrimination, but the concept lacks a clear understanding of race and structural racism. Newer frameworks have emerged situating Muslim experiences within race scholarship.
The authors conclude with a call to scholars to embark on studies that fill major gaps in this emerging field of study—such as intersectional approaches that incorporate gender, communities of belonging, black
Muslim experiences, class, and sexuality—and to remain conscious of the global dimensions of this racial project.
Publications from the 1990's by Louise Cainkar
Books by Louise Cainkar
Papers by Louise Cainkar