Professor Dr. Areej Sabbagh Khoury

Biography

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is a scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on Political Sociology, Historical Sociology, and Knowledge Production, examining the material and symbolic mechanisms that sustain structures of hierarchy, exclusion, and violence within settler colonial regimes. Drawing on critical social theory, she investigates how power operates within institutional, discursive, and ideological frameworks to maintain dominance and enforce dispossession. Methodologically, she employs a range of qualitative approaches including historical archival research, ethnography, in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis to unravel mechanisms that are historically and socially constructed. Sabbagh-Khoury's work engages key sociological debates surrounding power, inequality, and violence, contributing to critical discussions on race, empire, and colonialism. Her publishing portfolio includes leading journals such as Sociological Theory, Politics & Society, Theory & Society, and Current Sociology, with her latest book titled 'Colonizing Palestine: Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba' released by Stanford University Press in 2023, focusing on the formation of settler colonial hierarchies in Mandatory Palestine.

Research Interests