Nima Dahir

Research

I study how the forces of race and nativity impact neighborhoods and residents. In my dissertation, I explore how Black immigrants’ intersection of race and nativity determine their residential patterns, individual outcomes, and neighborhood trajectories. As Black immigrants transform the diversity of the category of Black in the United States, understanding their impacts on the neighborhoods in which they live alongside other Black people provides insight into the future of racialized spatial stratification. 

In several other projects, I focus on how race and nativity are associated with various dimensions of neighborhood change, including the racial composition of property ownership, access to affordable housing, surveillance camera prevalence, and physical disorder.

Altogether, my research (a) broadens our sociological understanding of how race and nativity intersect to determine the creation, perpetuation, or reduction of spatial inequality, and (b) broadens our methodological and theoretical toolkit to answer questions limited by traditional approaches.

I received my B.S. in mathematics and economics from the Ohio State University and an M.A. in sociology from Stanford University. My work has been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Sociological Methods & Research and has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Educational Research Association, the National Science Foundation, Stanford University Vice Provost for Graduate Education, and the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship.

Publications

Dahir, Nima. 2023. “Re-Learning to be a Woman: Virtual Space and Post-Migration Womanhood in the Somali Diaspora”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Hwang, Jackelyn, Nima Dahir, Mayuka Sarukkai, and Gabby Wright. 2023. “Curating Training Data for Reliable Large-Scale Visual Data Analysis: Lessons from Identifying Trash in Street View Imagery”. Sociological Methods and Research.