Mohammad Nasir

Preliminary abstract: My dissertation focuses on community-based counterterror programs and their modes of scientific inquiry to trace the effects of the ‘War on Terror’ on urban policing and secular rule in the U.S. State. I propose to conduct ethnographic research on the recently implemented Countering Violent Extremism Program (CVE) in Los Angeles, CA, to investigate how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Los Angeles law enforcement draw on scientific expertise from terrorism studies to police and govern Muslim American communities. I aim to: investigate how anxieties about global terrorism are shaping domestic policing practices towards minorities in the national security state; identify how scientific methods and theories to explain and curb global terrorism are being introduced, developed, and contested in encounters between domestic law enforcement departments and Muslim American communities; and understand how the use of science in law enforcement policing practices may be shaping U.S. State secularism. This project will provide an on-the-ground ethnographic account of the everyday implications of the changes to domestic governance and policing in the context of the ongoing global War on Terror. It will also offer a much-needed perspective on the role of science–in this case the science of terrorism studies, in managing religion and shaping secularism in post-9/11 U.S.