Baljit Nagra has published the book Securitized Citizens: Canadian Muslims’ Experiences of Race Relations and Identity Formation Post–9/11. To get a copy of the book, please visit University of Toronto Press.
Uninformed and reactionary responses in the years following the events of 9/11 and the ongoing ‘War on Terror’ have greatly affected ideas of citizenship and national belonging. In Securitized Citizens, Baljit Nagra, develops a new critical analysis of the ideas dominant groups and institutions try to impose on young Canadian Muslims and how in turn they contest and reconceptualize these ideas. Nagra conducted fifty in-depth interviews with young Muslim adults in Vancouver and Toronto and her analysis reveals how this group experienced national belonging and exclusion in light of the Muslim ‘other’, how they reconsidered their cultural and religious identity, and what their experiences tell us about contemporary Canadian citizenship. The rich and lively interviews in Securitized Citizens successfully capture the experiences and feelings of well-educated, second-generation, and young Canadian Muslims. Nagra acutely explores how racial discourses in a post–9/11 world have affected questions of race relations, religious identity, nationalism, white privilege, and multiculturalism.
Baljit Nagra is currently an Assistant Professor in the Criminology Department at the University of Ottawa. She has previously held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Ottawa and at York University after receiving her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto. Her research aims to understand how racial discourses are rearticulated in the ‘War on Terror’. Her intellectual interest is in learning how racial boundaries are transformed through a language of gender, religion and security, creating ‘legitimate/desirable’ and ‘illegitimate/undesirable’ members of westerns nations, and reproducing past racialized nation state projects. Her research has been published in refereed journals such as the Canadian Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is also the author of a book titled Securitized Citizens: Canadian Muslims Experiences of Race Relations and Identity Formation Post 9/11 that was recently published by the University of Toronto Press. At the University of Ottawa, she is conducting a nation wide study that measures the impact of counter terrorism policies on Muslim communities in Canada. Her main areas of interest are in Race and Ethnicity, National Security and Surveillance, Gender Studies and Qualitative Research.