Dr. Yousef Baker joins me to discuss the effects of the Iraq War on the Iraqi people, the Iraqi Narratives Project and anti-Muslim racism and its connection to larger national and global issues, including racial projects right here in the United States.
Dr. Yousef K. Baker is an assistant professor in the International Studies Program currently at California State University, Long Beach. He is also the co-director of the Global Middle East Studies Program. Dr. Baker’s career both as a student and an educator have been in California’s public education system, graduating from LAUSD, finishing his BA in Political Science from UCLA, his Master’s and Doctorate in Sociology from UCSB, and working at CSULB since 2014.
Dr. Baker looks at global political economy with an interest in how race, nationalism, post-colonial development, and social movements shape our contemporary world. His work focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, where he has been looking at the political economy of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Dr. Baker has been recently working on issues of anti-Muslim racism and their connection to larger national and global issues, where he shows how this racializing process shape politics in the US and broader global geo-politics as well. In addition to this research, Dr. Baker is one of the co-founders of the Iraqi Narratives Project, where alongside other collaborators he has collected oral histories of people who migrated from Iraq to the US and Canada.
As an educator, and as a resident of Long Beach since 2010, and greater Los Angeles since 1993, Dr. Baker is always asking how does our life locally shape and is shaped by the lives of others living around the globe?