I write about civil rights issues, incarceration and security, and inequities. I focus on Muslim communities and the past and present "War on Terror."
I use data analysis and documents-focused reporting to frame my work, both journalistic and academic. I use R and Python for parsing data, Datawrapper for visualization work, and MAXQDA for research-based data work.
I am currently an assistant professor at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School Of Public Communication, teaching journalism with an emphasis on data analysis, underreported communities and civil liberties. I'm a 2023-2025 Lender Center for Social Justice faculty fellow, and my academic research focuses on the news coverage of "War on Terror" defendants and infrastructures after 9/11. My work has been published in The Nation, The Huffington Post, The Appeal and The Chicago Tribune, among other outlets. Over the past several years, I've written about
- the expansion of post-9/11, extra-restrictive federal prison units often used to punish dissent;
- Adel Daoud's unusual terrorism case in Chicago;
- Muslim Americans affected by the 2017 Muslim Ban;
- struggling efforts in Illinois and nationally to implement BOP guidance to empty prisons and jails as much as possible during the global pandemic;
- a surge of COVID-19 cases at the Marion federal prison facility, and the conditions at the prison, as reported to me by inmates and their family members;
- COVID-19's unique effects on communities of color;
- FBI surveillance on an Arab-American neighborhood of Illinois;
- the controversial "Guantánamo North" prison units in the Midwest that house mostly Muslim prisoners;
- the uphill battle refugee agencies are facing under the Trump administration;
- the legal back-and-forth of Trump's "Muslim ban";
- pharmacy deserts in Black neighborhoods of Chicago
- Islam-related terms and anti-Muslim hate crime data regularly used and misused by reporters;
- and allegations of improper business contracts at an Oakland charter school system, which eventually had its charter revoked.
I am frequently asked to speak or teach about news coverage of the "War on Terror," using data and FOIA skills to cover underrepresented communities, basic programming concepts and strategies, and the limits of using data in journalism.
I graduated from the UC Berkeley Graduate School Of Journalism in 2014 with a Master's degree in Multimedia Journalism, and from NYU in 2011 with Bachelor's degrees in Journalism and Middle Eastern Studies.
Download my full CV here. [Updated Fall 2023]