Nabila N. Islam is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University and the undergraduate fellowship advisor at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+). She holds an AM in Sociology, as well as graduate certificates in Collaborative Humanities and postsecondary teaching from Brown, graduate certificate in Teaching Race from the Mellon Consortium for Centering Race, and Honors BAs in History and Politics from York University in Toronto. Her research examines the past, present, future of migrant and refugee detention. Her dissertation looks at how the British and the American empires and their collaborators, i.e., international organizations and postcolonial states, developed refugee and migrant detention regimes in North America and South Asia from the 17th to the cusp of the 21st century and illuminates the inextricable entwinement of racial capitalism and detention. A second project, based on court ethnography, uses the voices of immigrant detainees, only ever publicly heard at the immigrant courts, to illuminate how racial capitalism and coloniality currently structure the US empire-state’s vast detention and deportation system. A third research project, established with a 60,000 USD grant from Migrantes Unidos and Henry Luce Foundation, is a community-academic research partnership and investigates the harms of the emerging technologies of the Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, through which ICE conducts 24/7 surveillance and digital detention of immigrants.
