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Research Interests

My work is rooted in the belief that families and communities hold deep knowledge about care, resilience, and healing—and that research should honor, support, and learn from that knowledge.

Research Focus Areas

My research bridges autism, migration, mental health, and human rights, drawing from social epidemiology, disability studies, medical anthropology, and community-engaged research. Guided by relational and decolonial approaches to knowledge, my work focuses on:

  • Examining pathways to screening, diagnosis, and early intervention, with attention to how families navigate fragmented service systems.

  • Understanding how displacement, resettlement, linguistic navigation, cultural identity, and intergenerational care shape health decision-making.

  • Investigating how policy landscapes, public health infrastructures, and legal precarity shape access to care for displaced communities across the U.S. and globally.

  • Studying how individuals, families, and communities experience and make meaning of loss—of homeland, identity, opportunity, or imagined futures—and how care, faith, storytelling, and community ritual support healing.

  • Exploring how families understand autism; how stigma is resisted and reinterpreted; and how advocacy emerges through kinship, faith, and community networks.

  • Conducting research grounded in accountability and collaboration—not extraction—through co-designed interviews, Photovoice, shared sense-making, and relational research ethics.

  • Connecting local caregiving experiences to wider Somali diasporic histories of resilience, displacement, and collective self-determination.