Randa B. Serhan
Randa Bassem Serhan (Arabic: رندة باسم سرحان) is a political sociologist and ethnographer who writes on ethnic minorities, urban sociology and questions of citizenship and is associated with the American University of Beirut (AUB) as an affiliate faculty member.
Biography
The daughter of sociology professor Bassem Serhan, Randa was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Kuwait, where she graduated from high school at the American School of Kuwait in 1990.[i] In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, she and her family moved to Beirut, where she attended the American University of Beirut, earning her Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology in 1994, graduating with high distinction.[ii] Serhan went on to pursue her master’s degree in criminology and sociology from the University of Windsor, obtaining it in 1998.[iii] She then returned to Beirut and became a part-time instructor at AUB in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences from 1998 to 2001, teaching introductory courses in sociology.[iv] After earning her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2009, where she was a Cordier Fellow from 2007-2009 and worked under the supervision of Charles Tilly, Herbert Gans, and Gil Eyal, she returned to AUB and served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences from 2009-2011.[v] In 2011, Serhan became an Assistant Professor of Sociology at American University (AU) in Washington, D.C., where she remained until 2020. While at AU, she founded the BA in Arab World Studies degree program, in addition to being the program’s inaugural director from 2011 to 2016.[vi] According to her, Samih Farsoun – who was also the dissertation advisor to Bassem Serhan, Randa’s father – originally conceived of the Arab Studies program at the American University, based on the conviction that the Arab world is a contiguous – albeit non-rigid – region and that scholarship of it requires a separate academic approach with a more contextualized focus.[vii] Although Arab Studies existed as a program prior to Randa Serhan’s arrival at the American University, in which several directors followed Farsoun, the program officially began offering Bachelor’s degrees in 2011, under the directorship of Serhan.[viii] Since its founding, Serhan has developed the program’s curriculum, employing an interdisciplinary approach to international politics and Arab world studies.[ix] As an instructor, Serhan has taught courses on topics related but not limited to social theory, political sociology, social exclusion, urban sociology, U.S. society, Arab world studies, as well as gender and sexuality.[x] Serhan is a member of the Arab American Scholars affiliation within the Arab American Research Initiative, a national project of ACCESS; a member of the American Sociological Association; and a co-operative member of the Honour Crimes Project, jointly coordinated by the Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Laws (CIMEL) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights (INTERIGHTS).[xi] She is currently an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB).[xii]
Academic work
As a sociologist, Randa Serhan is primarily interested in researching questions of citizenship and nationalism, urban sociology, U.S. ethnicity and migration, sociological theory, Arabs and Arab Americans, as well as cosmopolitanism and refugees.
Serhan began her research career with questions about the place of women in the Lebanese legal system and the silencing of victims of honor crimes.[xiii] In her M.A. thesis, “Honor Without Women: Honor and Legitimization of Murder in the Criminal Courts of Lebanon,” Serhan examines court archives and transcripts of 36 honor crimes tried in Lebanon in 1995, arguing that her findings reveal an unadulterated leniency towards the killers in addition to dispelling common misconceptions about the reality of honor crimes and the perception of Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism as perpetuating factors, in particular.[xiv] The text concludes not only that the state exhibits ambivalence towards honor crimes, but that its ambiguity of the penal code in these cases grants the few individuals who are involved great discretion in defining honor, and therefore the nature of the murders, often resulting in prevailing defenses that are incoherent and unjust.[xv] Serhan makes clear that this reality reflects absolute discrimination against females in the courtroom, speaking to a larger, “hegemonic discourse that obscures the reality of the murder, and increases the margin of acceptable justifications for killing a female relative.”[xvi]
Serhan’s pivotal text, Assimilation Suspended: The Making of Palestinian Americans, is based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of Palestinian Americans in the New York metropolitan area and New Jersey, which was researched from 2001-2019.[xvii] The book is primarily based on her 2009 ethnographic study and dissertation which offers a focus on second-generation Palestinian American communities – dispersed across parts of Brooklyn, New York, and North Jersey. She is especially interested in the Palestinian-American communities that were established by the chain migrations of Palestinians who immigrated to the United States after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, resulting in the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.[xviii] The text aims to explain the interaction of three levels of politics from the macro-level that brought Palestinians to the United States after 1967 and informed their identification of themselves as exiles; to the meso-level in the form of American public opinion – especially after the September 11th Attacks that reinvigorated rejection and, in turn, demanded reincorporation – and finally to the micro-level of identity politics in maintaining boundaries on a daily basis.[xix] Three primary arguments are put forward in her book:
1.) Especially in the context of contemporary migrations, how the political circumstances of the place of origin and destination inform assimilation must be taken into account.
2). Even among stigmatized communities, there is a strong aspiration of belonging.
3.) The celebration of ethnicity (understood as nationalism) through the construction of space reinforces a certain allegiance to and membership in the American polity.[xx]
In her 2009 dissertation entitled Suspended Community: An Ethnographic Study of Palestinian-Americans in New York and New Jersey, upon which the book is based, Serhan raises questions concerned with the social network of Palestinian-Americans and the impact of their transnational relationships on their political identity both as Palestinians and as Americans, as well as their relationship to the West Bank.[xxi] In particular, Serhan offers observations on the network’s ideological underpinnings, comparisons between the in-group and out-group, and the mechanisms of internal control employed by the interlocutors of the study. Employing the understanding of ideology as, “the narrative self-presentation of a group meant to justify the existence of the group and legitimates its power over individual members,” her employment of the term aims to debunk misguided assumptions, particularly of Palestinian-American communities, of blind belief.[xxii] Serhan’s observations of how the Palestinian-American interlocutors made use of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ comparisons are grounded in the imagery of concentric circles, whereby distinctions made are ‘of degree and not of complete opposition.’[xxiii] To briefly summarize the various examples of in vs. out-group distinctions that are made, Serhan cites other Palestinian groups – namely, non-West Bank Palestinians, especially those who are not falaheen; other Arab groups; neighborly ethnic groups in the United States; and Amarikeen (i.e. white majority).[xxiv] Nevertheless, Serhan employs an overall sociological focus on processes and interacting networks that ultimately complicates essentializing categorizations of ethnic identification, ideological positionality, and network formation. As stated in the 2019 panel, “Israelis in the US (Israel Diaspora Past and Present Conference, 2nd Panel)” at American University, in which she based her presentation on the longitudinal ethnographic study:
“I work with ethnic identification, which means self-identification … and I also don’t include people who don’t self-identify as belonging to a group. That’s a very different way from [how] the State counts people, how demographers count people, but the way we look at it, is self-identification … And so rather, what I look at – using [Rogers Brubaker’s] work – is that I move towards processes. If there is conflict, if there is interaction, when does it occur and what happens there? And so I am less interested in the rigid categorizations but what’s also interesting about that is then I can release the community I look at from saying, ‘ well as Palestinians born in the United States you categorically have this relationship with the State of Israel or you categorically feel this way. That’s an ideological argument that I don’t think is accurate as a sociologist and I’m not comfortable with in general. So I look at processes and so the process is why is Israel central to multiple generations of Palestinians born in the United States? Because they intersect and interact with the State of Israel continuously in their lives.”[xxv]
In Suspended Community Serhan observes key mechanisms of internal control within the Palestinian-American communities whom she studies, using Charles Tilly’s notion of trust networks – cited in her text as, “ramified interpersonal connections, consisting mainly of strong ties, within which people set-valued, consequential, long-term resources and enterprises at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, or failures of others.”[xxvi] She highlights the ritual of marriage as a key site of building ties, entangling individuals and families whom are already connected with one another in addition to observing the role that risk plays in necessarily reaffirming measures of trust within the network.[xxvii] Additionally, Serhan highlights three mechanisms of internal boundary-making: surveillance and gossip, financial transactions, and competition. Because Serhan’s ethnographical analysis is mainly interested in the network’s self-identification, she highlights the contentious relationship between reality and the ideological projections about Palestinian uniqueness or idyllic qualities, while also insisting upon a non-essentializing lens in viewing the dynamism of the community informed by continuously changing boundaries and relationships that are constantly reinforced, threatened, and negotiated internally.[xxviii]
Her second forthcoming book, Neither Thugs nor Terrorists: Black-Palestinian Solidarity Movements in the United States, employs a comparative historical analysis of works written between the 1960s and the 1980s about and/or from the perspective of Black-Palestinian solidarity; examines contemporary political movements based on press statements, newspaper articles, poetry and other materials produced by activists in addition to interviews with activists throughout the United States; and makes use of snowball sampling in order to gain access to current and former activists of different generations.[xxix]
Selected works
 |
Serhan, R. 2017. “Ethnic Weddings: Reinventing the Nation in Exile,” in Ernesto Castaneda (Ed), Immigration and Categorical Inequality: Migration to the City and the Birth of Race and Ethnicity.
Routledge.
Serhan, R. (November 2016). Book review. Palestinian Commemoration in Israel (3rd ed., vol. 45, pp. 2). Thousand Oaks, CA: American Sociological Association/SAGE.
Serhan, R. (Summer 2016). Book review. Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880-1900 (2015). New York, NY: Kalimah Press.
Serhan, R. (March 2016). Book review. Jerusalem: The Spatial Politics of a Divided Metropolis (1st ed., vol. 15, pp. 3). Hanover, PA: American Sociological Association/Wiley Blackwell.
Serhan, R. 2014. “Muslim Immigration to America,” in Haddad, Yvonne and Jane Smith (editors). The Oxford Handbook of American Islam. Oxford
University Press (page numbers forthcoming).
Serhan, R. 2013. Review of: Wayne Baker, Sally Howell, Amaney Jamal, et al. “Detroit Arab American Study Team. Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11” New York: Russell Sage Foundation, (2009). Arab Studies Quarterly, issue 35, 2. California: Pluto Publishers.
Serhan, R. 2013. Review of: Paul Tabar, Greg Noble, and Scott Poynting. “On Being Lebanese in Australia: Identity, Racism, and the Ethnic Field Beirut, Lebanon” Lebanese American University Press, (2009). Arab Studies Quarterly, issue 35, 1. California: Pluto Publishers.
Serhan, R. 2011. “Palestinian and Jordanian Immigrants,” in Bayer, Ronald (editor).
Multicultural America: An Encyclopedia of the Newest Americans.
California: ABC-CLIO Publishers, pp. 1695-1730.
Chowkwanyun, Merlin and Randa Serhan (editors). (2011, paperback 2013). American Democracy and the Pursuit of Equality.
Serhan, R. 2008. “Palestinian Weddings: The Invention of Palestine in New Jersey,” in Journal for Palestine Studies, 37 (4), pp. 21-37. UC-Berkeley
Press.
Serhan, R. 2005. “Virginity: Arab States,” in Joseph, Suad (editor). Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, Volume 3: Family, Body, Sexuality and Health. The Netherlands: Brill Publishing, pp. 457-458.
References
[i] Serhan, Randa Bassem. “About,” Accessed November 15, 2020, https://www.randabserhan.com/about.
[ii] Serhan, “About.”
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Serhan, R. “Teaching,” Accessed November 15, 2020, https://www.randabserhan.com/teaching.
[v] Serhan, “About.”
[vi] Serhan, R. “Arab World Studies,” Accessed November 15, 2020, https://www.randabserhan.com/arab-studies.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid
[x] Serhan, "Teaching.”
[xi] Serhan, “About.”
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Serhan, R. “Honor Without Women: Honor and the Legitimizations of Murder in the Criminal Courts of Lebanon.” M.A. thesis, American University of Beirut, 1997, 156. https://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0012/MQ52480.pdf.
[xv] Serhan, 161.
[xvi] Serhan, iv.
[xvii] Serhan, R. “Publications,” Accessed November 15, 2020, https://www.randabserhan.com/publications.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Serhan, R. “Suspended Community: An Ethnographic Study of Palestinian-Americans in New York and New Jersey.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2009, 22.
[xxii] Serhan, 216.
[xxiii] Serhan, 234.
[xxiv] Ibid.
[xxv] Serhan, R. “Palestinian New Yorkers and the State of Israel: Negation, Reckoning, and Internal Boundary Making.” Presented at the Israel Diaspora Past and Present Conference: Israelis in the US (2nd Panel), American University, Washington, D.C., April 26, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxK8zkPqs2Q, 47:09 - 1:09:23.
[xxvi] Serhan, “Suspended Community,” 237.
[xxvii] Ibid.
[xxviii] Serhan, 276.
[xxix] Serhan, “Publications.”
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