Abrar Alshammari works on questions of citizenship, inequality, and family formation in the Arab Gulf states. She is interested in exploring how state policies shape and inform people's minute and major life experiences, including but not limited to education, marriage, mental wellbeing, and migration. She is pursuing her training in ethnography and other qualitative tools in sociology. She completed her MA from Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and her BA at the American University of Kuwait. She was born and raised in Kuwait, and is fluent in Arabic and English, with intermediate knowledge of Persian and Turkish.