Areas of interest: Law and Society; Legal Hermeneutics; Cultural Sociology; Comparative Historical Sociology; Political Sociology; Social and Political Theory; Islam; Migration and Refugee Studies; Lyrical Expression
Asma Rahimyar’s research broadly revolves around conducting critical translatory work between the state and society, with the objective of specifying what may be done to address hermeneutical lacunas extant within the realms of refugee, asylum, and immigration law, international human rights law, jurisprudence, transitional justice, and humanitarian discourses.
As such, Asma is interested in examining cultural structures which shape the juridical field and detailing how they are mediated by actors aiming to render individual experiences legible to relevant institutional arbiters. She also seeks to identify paralleling cultural structures which facilitate resistance towards these statist paradigms of meaning across individual and collective subjectivities.
Asma received a B.S. in Political Science and a B.A. in Philosophy from Southern Connecticut State University, as well as a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies and a MSc in Political Theory Research from the University of Oxford. She is a Rhodes Scholar and a Truman Scholar.