Arabs in America: Building a New Future

About the Contributors

About the Contributors BAHA AB V - LABAN is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Director, Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration, at the University of Alberta. He has published widely in the areas of ethnic and minority groups, leadership, sociology of development, and sociology of the Middle East, including An Olive Branch on the Family Tree: The Arabs in Canada; Arabs in America: Myths and Realities; and The Muslim Community in North America. Dr. Abu-Laban has served as President of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association and the Association of Arab-American University Graduates. SHARON McIRVIN AB V-LABAN is Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta. She is past Chair of the University of Alberta Centre for Gerontology and has served as Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology. Her publications include Muslim Families in North America, The Arab World: Dynamics of Development, and journal articles and chapters on the sociology of aging, the family, comparative development, gender, religion, education, and theory. KRISTINE AJROVCH, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan. She has researched how adolescent children of Muslim Lebanese immigrants in the United States form ethnic identities and is working on a book that addresses the acculturation and assimilation processes that second-generation Lebanese and Yemeni adolescents in America live in ethnic communities. FATIMA AGHA AL-HAYANI was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She holds a REd. in English and French, M.A. in French Language and literature, M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies , and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her doctoral concentration was Muslim Jurisprudence and Family Law. She teaches Islam, Muslim Philosophy, and Middle East society and politics in the departments of Philosophy, Sociology, and Political Science at the University of Toledo. She also teaches French and English at the high school level. 338 CONTRIBUTORS RICHARD T. ANTOUN is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has written three books on the basis of his research trips to Jordan over the past 30 years: Arab Village: A Social Structural Study of a Transjordanian Peasant Community (1972); Low-Key Politics: Local-Level Leadership and Change in the Middle East (1979); and Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective (1989). He has also co-edited four interdisciplinary volumes. He has completed the manuscript "Transnational Migration in the Post-modern World" and has begun another entitled "Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Change at the Turn of the Century . " BARBARA C. ASWAD is Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit. She has written Property Control and Social Strategies: Settlers on a Middle Eastern Plain (1971), edited Arabic Speaking Communities in American Cities (1974), and co-edited Family and Gender Among American Muslims: Issues Facing Middle Eastern Immigrants and Their Descendants (1996). She served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and has served on the Board of Directors of the Arab Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) in Dearborn, Michigan , for more than twenty-five years. LOUISE CAINKAR is a sociologist and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois-Great Cities Institute. She specializes in issues of inequality and human rights concerning racial and ethnic groups, immigrants, and migrants. She has published numerous articles on human rights in the Middle East and on Arab Americans. She is completing a book on Palestinian immigrants in the United States that will be published by Temple University Press. As a scholar and activist, Dr. Cainkar also does a significant amount of work with community-based organizations in Chicago. LAWRENCE DAVID S ON is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at West Chester University. His research focuses on the evolution of American perceptions of Palestine from 1917 to 1948. His work has been published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Middle East Policy, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Biblical Archaeology. ROSINA HASSOUN holds a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and a Master of Science in Biology from Texas A&M University. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 1995. Hassoun's area of study is the Middle East and Arab Americans. She has published articles in the Florida Journal of Anthropology , The Link, and a chapter in Water, Culture, and Power (Island Press, 1998), edited by John Donahue and Barbara Johnston. Dr. Hassoun is an adjunct professor at Michigan State University. IBRAHIM HAYANI is...