Young people of South Asian, Afghan and Arab descent growing up in a post-9/11 world feel constantly under suspicion and surveillance. Their lives are the focus of the book The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror (New York University Press, 2016) by Sunaina Marr Maira, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Asian American Studies. The book has just been released to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies, and affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies program and the Cultural Studies Graduate Group. Her research and teaching focus on Asian, Arab, and Muslim American youth culture, migrant rights and refugee organizing, and transnational movements challenging militarization, imperialism, and settler colonialism. 

Maira was a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow for 2019-20 and has been doing transnational research project focuses on Arab refugees and immigrants in the Bay Area and in Athens, Greece. Her new community-engaged project is focused on Yemeni Americans in Oakland and the impact of the pandemic, the Muslim Bans, and the war in Yemen. Her ethnographic research highlights the experiences of Yemeni corner store owners and their families who were essential workers on the frontlines of the pandemic. In partnership with the StoryCenter, she has produced digital stories with Yemeni and Arab Americans in the Bay Area that highlight alternative narratives and underdiscussed stories about the Covid "crisis," the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, the War on Terror, Islamophobia, and community organizing. 

She is the author of five monographs, including The 9/11 Generation: Youth,  Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror and Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine. Her work on South Asian and Muslim American youth includes Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City and Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire After 9/11. She published a book based on ethnographic research in Palestine, Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement.

View the book at New York University Press