Most recently, Aliyah completed her M.A. in Sociology (with distinction) at the University of Notre Dame. The thesis offered an in-depth exploration of the lives and learning experiences of one of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: young, Black men, specifically those from urban, impoverished communities of color. Culminating five months of ethnographic research in an all-Black, all-boys Charter High School in a Midwestern City, Aliyah collected over 40 hours of classroom observations, 32 in-depth interviews, and survey data. She found that the presence of narratives of hypermasculinity in the school bred a toxic learning environment rife with heteronormative, patriarchal, and sexualized expectations, understandings, and performances of brotherhood and manhood. Such performances had detrimental effects on these boys’ socialization in and out of school contexts, especially considering the #MeToo era we are presently in. These findings highlighted how the young, Black boys at the school became inextricably bound to reproduce the very systems of inequality that delineated them as products of antiquity and undeserving of access to sustainable opportunities for mobility.

Outside of this project, Aliyah is most interested in empirically exploring how racialized narratives of [hyper]masculinity are constructed, performed, and reproduced within sites of inequality, such as schools, prisons, and neighborhoods. Relatedly, Aliyah is interested in uncovering causal mechanisms that lead Black men to engage in violence and crime, namely the conditions of their urban milieu and uneven power relations. At the heart of these interests, Aliyah is concerned with shedding light on the lingering effects of racism and racial inequality across time and space as well as dismantling the myths that have been constructed to delineate Black people as undeserving and unworthy of participation within the civil sphere. Predominately, Aliyah has used ethnographic and interview methods to examine these issues but is open to collaborating on mixed-method projects that explore similar and related queries.