Unwanted: Muslim Immigrants, Dignity and Drug Dealing

An ethnographer at heart, my first major research project was a five-year long ethnography with 55 second-generation male Muslim drug dealers in Frankfurt, Germany. This work won the second prize of the Koerber Studienpreis – the highest award for doctoral dissertations in Germany. I later turned my Ph.D. dissertation into a book published with Oxford University Press.

Unwanted: Muslim Immigrants, Dignity, and Drug Dealing (2014) examines an issue of critical ongoing relevance: the integration of Muslim immigrants in Western societies. Building on five years of intensive ethnographic research, Unwanted provides unprecedented insights into the relationship among immigration, social exclusion, and the informal economy. Having spent countless hours with these young men, hanging out in the streets, in cafes or bars and at the local community center, Unwanted explores the intimate aspects of their, one of the most discriminated and excluded populations in Germany. I look at how the young men negotiate their participation in the drug market while still trying to adhere to their cultural and religious obligations and how they struggle to find a place within German society. The young men considered their involvement in the drug trade a response to their exclusion at the same time that it provides a means of forging an identity and a place within German society.  It is extremely rare for women to conduct in-depth crime ethnographies, making this ethnography stand out in the field. In particular, where street culture is often defined by extreme levels of machismo, being a woman allowed me to move past this stereotype to outline how issues of family, marriage, and neighborhood fit into the dynamics of drug dealing. Within a year of its publication, the book was highly lauded in reviews published in eight major peer-reviewed journals and was featured in an author-meets-critic session at the American Society of Criminology meeting in 2014. 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/unwanted-9780199856473?cc=ca&lang=en&

I am still in contact with several of my participants from “way back when” and remain passionate about ethnographic work. I have written about my experiences as a “trusted outsider” in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891241613497747 and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891241618785225

 and have also edited a handbook on Crime Ethnography (see handbooks).