A New Coriolis Client: Hajar Yazdiha

We are thrilled to work with author and professor Hajar Yazdiha. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute, and a 2023-2025 CIFAR Global Azrieli Scholar. Dr. Yazdiha received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is a former Ford Postdoctoral Fellow and Turpanjian Postdoctoral Fellow of the Chair in Civil Society and Social Change.

What are the social forces that bring us together and keep us apart? What does it take to feel like we belong, to a community and to one another? Hajar Yazdiha’s research shows how powerful institutions like law and media categorize groups into an “us” and a “them” and make the boundaries between us feel real and natural. She also shows how these categories matter for everyday people, the communities where we feel like we belong, and how this “groupness” shapes our identity, our politics, and even our imaginations of what type of society may be possible.

Dr. Yazdiha’s research examines these questions by analyzing the mechanisms underlying the politics of inclusion and exclusion. This work crosses subfields of race and ethnicity, migration, social movements, culture, and law using mixed methods including interview, survey, historical, and computational text analysis.

Dr. Yazdiha’s new book entitled, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton University Press) examines how a wide range of rivaling social movements across the political spectrum deploy competing interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement to make claims around national identity and inclusion. Comparing how rival movements constituted by minority and majority groups with a range of identities — racial, gender, sexuality, religious, moral, political — battle over collective memory, the book documents how the misuses of the racial past erode multicultural democracy.

This research provides new insights into the relationship between macro-level institutional structures, meso-level group processes of collective identity formation and collective behavior, and micro-level perceptions, emotions, and mental health. Through her research, Dr. Yazdiha works to understand how systems of inequality become entrenched and how groups develop strategies to resist, contest, and manifest alternative futures.