Diasporic Mobilities on Vacation is a nuanced exploration of the embodied and affective practices of Moroccans from Europe visiting Morocco for summer vacation. Rather than characterizing them as uncomfortably split between homelands, this book focuses on how their touristic leisure practices create their own space of diasporic belonging.

I wrote this book as a second adaptation of my PhD and followup research. The first one (Becoming Diasporically Moroccan) focused on the sociolinguistic aspects of visiting Morocco diasporically; this book focuses on mobilities -- how visitors travel together, move through Morocco, and make spaces for themselves there. 

Moreover, I wrote it as a 'choose your adventure' book. Instead of long, theory-laden analyses, it is composed of dozens of vignettes that show how diasporic visitors are attracted to visiting 'home' through visceral attachments, experience visiting home through layered embodiments, but also keep themselves separate from some aspects of Morocco through careful insulations. I hope it is a book that people who follow similar trajectories as diasporic visitors can read and recognize their own experiences.

Becoming Diasporically Moroccan gathers several years of data on communicative practices in markets that I collected with Moroccan-Europeans visiting Morocco during their summer holidays. 

In 2005, I started recording marketplace bargaining because I wanted naturally-occurring data about how diasporic visitors applied their language skills in using multiple codes outside the home environment. What I discovered was that their skills were not as poor as many self-evaluated, but there are more complicated and subtle aspects of place-based knowledges and practices that make them 'seem' poor. 

This book analyzes those knowledges through how locally-resident vendors and diasporically-resident clients categorize each other in the course of bargaining.

I wrote Moroccan Dreams with Professor Claudio Minca as my first project post-PhD. 

He started with a research question about how French theories of modernity influenced the touristic imaginations of Morocco experienced by its many millions of visitors today. When I joined the project, we combined our research experiences and perspectives to investigate this question in 7 of the distinctive and famous (or infamous) cities and regions across Morocco: Rabat, Fez, Marrakech, Essaouira, the Kasbah region, the Sahara, and Tangier. 

Each chapter, including the preliminary historical chapter about how European versions and visions of Morocco evolved over several centuries of contact, explores competing imaginaries and manifestations of that city, culminating in how it might be experienced by a touristic visitor today.