Hello!

I’m Khirad Siddiqui, a Ph.D. student in Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine. I’m a prison abolitionist broadly interested in Islam and the carceral state. 

My primary project examines Islam within the US prison system, and how it has come to hold such seemingly intractable associations with radicalism within the prison. This is through a historical analysis of the landscape of memory within the prison, radical prisoner organizing rooted in Islamic ideologies, and a refusal to submit to carceral authority. I’m currently working with a number of non profits, prison chaplains, and formerly incarcerated Muslims on this project.

Another project concerns honor crime in Pakistan through an analysis of the afterlives of Qandeel Baloch. This project tracks not only the carceral and imperial feminist responses to Qandeel’s death as they constructed Pakistan as a site of extraordinary patriarchal violence and the honor crime as a natural cultural category, but also the lessons that a re-reading of her life might lend abolitionists within the US.

A central aim of my work is to build the necessary and often underdeveloped linkage between the prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes, as it relates to the broader vision of abolition as a necessarily transnational project.

You can reach me through email at kzsiddiq@uci.edu.