I cover civil liberties 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 bolster my stories -- I lean heavily on R and Python for parsing data and Datawrapper for visualization 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 infrastructures after 9/11. My work has been published in The Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Oakland North, among other outlets. Over the past several years, I've investigated
- 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 using data and FOIA skills to cover underrepresented communities, basic programming concepts and strategies, and the limits of using data in American journalism.
I graduated from the UC Berkeley Graduate School Of Journalism in 2014 with a specialization in Data Journalism, and from NYU in 2011 with degrees in Journalism and Middle Eastern Studies.
I'm happy to chat -- you can reach me at nhusain at syr dot edu.