Maxamed Abu-maye, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University and is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

Maxamed is currently working on a monograph titled, The Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing ad Somali Refugees (under contract with University of California Press). This project, the first of its kind, exposes the links between U.S. military violence abroad and police violence at home by centering Somali refugee narratives that detail this militarized violence. As a project that draws from the methodologies and theoretical framework of Critical Refugee Studies, this books center refugees not as an object of study but as an analytic that exposes the often-hidden operations of U.S. militarism. According to Critical Refugee Studies scholar Yến Lê Espiritu, “refuge and refugees are co-constitutive, and that both are the (by)product of US militarism”—what she terms “militarized refuge(es).” The book follows the movement of Somali refugees from Somalia to Kenya and to their eventual arrival in San Diego to posit that Somali refugee’s movement across these disparate spaces shows how U.S. militarism produced and continues to structure Somali refugee life. It posits that a Somali refugee epistemology through storytelling exposes the links between U.S. militarism abroad and policing domestically.

Curriculum Vitae