Professor Sarroub's areas of interest include literacy, language and culture and discourse across home and school contexts; anthropology and education; cross-cultural studies; immigrant communities in the US and Europe; youth cultures; ethnography and qualitative research methods, ethnicity and gender in education; education policy and social analysis. Since 2001, she has been working on an multi-year ethnographic project related to school success, literacy, and low socioeconomic youth populations. The purpose of this cross-cultural research is to examine cultural, language, and literacy practices that may either hinder or support the intellectual, social, and socioeconomic success of low SES students at home and school. Sarroub is conducting fieldwork in a community that includes refugees from Iraq and am exploring youth and family literacy practices in and out of school. She is also examining how "reading" is taught at the high school level to accommodate both ELL populations, such as the Iraqis and other refugees, and American students who struggle with literacy. In conjunction with the microanalyses of the fieldwork, Dr. Sarroub is doing archival research on refugee and immigrant populations in the United States and Europe and interviewing individuals who are part of humanitarian efforts. She anticipates writing a book based on this research, tentatively titled Transnationalism in the Middle: Glocality, Literacy, and Schools.