Hajar Yazdiha is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California (USC) and faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute.
Yazdiha received her PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She researches the politics of inclusion and exclusion, examining the forces that bring us together — and that keep us apart — as we work to forge collective futures. Her mixed-method research shows how powerful institutions like law and media categorize groups into an “us” and a “them" and how this “groupness” shapes our identity, our politics, and even our imaginations of what type of society may be possible. In addition to award-winning articles, Hajar is author of the book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton University Press, 2023). Yazdiha is also a public scholar whose writing has been featured in dozens of outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Time, the Hill, and TheGrio.
Her project, “Reconciliation through Reckoning: Bridging Divides through Grassroots Memory Work,” asks how processes of truth and reconciliation can work to bridge community divides by reckoning with local pasts in the U.S. The project will compare five U.S.-based grassroots truth and reconciliation initiatives to examine how “grassroots memory work” unfolds to heal local divides, the dilemmas that emerge, and how understanding both the challenges and the successes might help us scale up to mitigate the polarization that threatens our pursuit of a “more perfect union.”
May 2024
