Shenandoah University’s One Big Question series continues during the Spring 2022 semester with events built around a centralized question: Why does it matter? Sessions will include presentations in a variety of formats and venues and will utilize the talents of faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences as well as presenters from other institutions.
Kicking off the spring semester’s slate of One Big Question events is a session titled “The Global War on Terror and Mass Surveillance: Racializing Muslims in the Name of Security” with Saher Selod, Ph.D., of Simmons University. The session is scheduled for Tuesday, March 8, at 7 p.m. in Henkel Hall, Hester Auditorium, and is open to everyone within and outside the Shenandoah University community.
Shenandoah University is quite fortunate to welcome Dr. Selod, whose research is significant and insightful. One of One Big Question’s objectives is to bring in some of the nation’s top scholars and engage our campus community and the broader area in topics that are timely. We’re certainly eagerly anticipating Dr. Selod’s presentation and discussion.”
Jonathan Noyalas ’01, M.A., director of Shenandoah’s McCormick Civil War Institute
Dr. Selod is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at Simmons University in Boston. She joined the Simmons Department of Sociology in 2012 after completing her Ph.D. at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests are in race and ethnicity, gender, religion and surveillance. Her scholarship examines how Muslim Americans experience racialization in the United States. Her book “Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror” (Rutgers University Press, 2018) examines how Muslim men and Muslim women experience gendered forms of racialization through their surveillance by the state and by private citizens.
Selod is currently writing a book with colleagues on the global racialization of Muslims, which is under contract at Polity Press. She is also collaborating on a second project that looks at surveillance, policing and political participation of Muslims in the United States that includes the experiences of African American and Black immigrant Muslims. Selod serves on the editorial boards of the Ethnic and Racial Studies and Critical Sociology publications. She is a member of the Scholars Strategy Network and is a faculty affiliate for the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University.
One Big Question, which debuted in 2019, engages the Shenandoah campus and broader community in open, respectful and civic dialogue on critical topics of the day. The series uses a mix of invited speakers, faculty lectures, cultural performances, specially designed courses, and other events to highlight and discuss a specific question chosen for each academic year.
This year’s series held its first event last September and featured four sessions during the Fall 2021 semester.For more information, visit https://www.su.edu/obq/.
