Khalil Habrih's research focuses on the transformations and regulation of urban spaces in Paris, France. Their previous research focused on racial experiences in the city and was concerned in particular with gentrification and police zoning in the Goutte d'Or (Paris, 18th arrondissement). Significantly, they highlighted the political and psychological consequences of police practices in "zones de sécurité prioritaires" on the young men and boys who undergo police checks and stop-and-frisk daily. Their current research is concerned with the powers of planning and urbanisme de préfiguration, and asks what techniques and technologies of power do city planners deploy to produce a desirable city? Building on queer theory and assembling fieldwork between cultures of expertise and profane queer perspectives on the city, they question what it means to desire the city and how leisure and pleasure come to be unevenly distributed.

Khalil is the co-author with Robert Desjarlais of Traces of Violence. Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France (2022, UC Press), which received the 2023 William A. Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (a section of the American Anthropological Association). More recently, and continuing nearly a decade’s worth of collaborative work with Robert Desjarlais, Khalil signed a co-authored book-chapter as first author, “Phantasm” in Routledge International Handbook in Visual Methods (eds. Rupert Cox and Christopher Wright).

In addition to their dissertation research, Khalil has worked within the Collaboratory with Professor Meg Stalcup and MA student Tara Tikuisis, developing an affective and topographical inquiry into political and aesthetic phenomena in Ottawa, Canada.

Khalil Habrih is a founding member (with Amy McLachlan) of the Spectrality, Temporality, Ethnography working group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. From Fall 2025 to Summer 2027, Khalil will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at Parsons The New School for Design financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.