Cigdem Sagir Mason

I am a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at UC Davis. My research interests focus on critical race and postcolonial theory, decoloniality/decolonial methods, modern secularity, postcoloniality and neoliberal governmentality, contemporary racism and racial violence, and discourse on immigration and immigrants in Europe. I have been working on postcoloniality and contemporary manifestations of racism, with particular emphasis on the racialization of immigrants and citizens in Europe. I have developed this subject by exploring the material and epistemological conditions that make such racism possible. I approach colonialism as a governmentality and the root cause of global inequity and violence. I am interested in how this governmentality has created the discourse on immigrants and citizens in Europe with the purpose of governing the former colonized subjects/European citizens in the European metropoles in the absence of formal colonial relations. I have been analyzing how this govenmentality is interwoven with the modern secular state’s project which regulates immigrants'/citizens' religious life by imposing proper citizenship. My research has received funding from TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) and I spent a year as a visiting researcher in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley.