About
Fadilat was born in Nigeria and raised in Staten Island, New York, which means she has spent most of her life navigating what it means to be Black, Nigerian, a 1.5 gen immigrant, and American all at once. That experience sits at the heart of her research.
She graduated with honors from CUNY Brooklyn College in 2018 with a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology, and is now a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation follows first-generation Nigerian and Jamaican immigrants in New York City, asking how they make sense of their encounters with policing, criminalization, and immigration enforcement, and whether, when, and how they connect those encounters to anti-Black racism. She interrogates the way anti-Blackness and immigration enforcement converge to render Black immigrants presumptively criminal and removable, regardless of their legal status, credentials, or civic participation.
Her broader research explores race, identity, and immigrant incorporation across transnational contexts, with a focus on how pre-migration experience shapes Black immigrants' responses to racialization and racism in the United States
Before graduate school, Fadilat worked as a Legal Assistant at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, supporting civil rights and racial justice litigation, and as a Research Assistant at the Thurgood Marshall Institute, LDF's interdisciplinary think tank. She is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a Rackham Merit Fellow.
When she is not in the field or buried in transcripts, Fadilat can be found at Pilates, tending to an ever-growing collection of houseplants, binge-watching YouTube videos down whatever rabbit hole finds her that week, and hunting down the next delicious recipe to try in the kitchen.
