Andrena Mason
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    HONGDENG GAO, PH.D. | FROM STATE-SANCTIONED VIOLENCE TO THE RIGHT TO A COMMUNITY HOSPITAL & ÒSCAR PRIETO-FLORES, PH.D. | NECROPOLITICS AT THE SOUTHERN EUROPEAN BORDER: CAUSES AND EXPLANATIONS FOR THE INCREASING NUMBER OF MIGRANTS DEATHS AND MISSING AT SEA

    Hongdeng Gao is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Inequality in America Initiative. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2023. Hongdeng is a historian of race and ethnicity, migration, public health, and social movements in modern America. Her first book project examines how Cold War geopolitics and cross-ethnic grassroots alliances improved access to healthcare for underserved Chinese New Yorkers. Hongdeng’s work places Asian American history alongside better known histories of Black and Latinx urban communities and underscores the positive legacies of grassroots, community-based initiatives. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Library of Congress, and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, among others. Gao will present the topic From State-Sanctioned Violence to the Right to A Community Hospital: A Multiracial Health Movement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, 1968-1975.

    Òscar Prieto-Flores is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Girona. He is the Academic Director of the Master’s Degree in Migratory Movements at the UdG. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Barcelona and was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University in 2006 and at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University in 2012. He is also Principal Investigator of the SAFESPACES research project ‘Mentoring, Wellbeing and Mental Health of Racialised Migrants and Refugees’ (2023-2025) and Vice-Chair of the Board of the IMISCOE network, the largest interdisciplinary network of researchers in the field of migration. Òscar has recently co-edited the book “Mentoring Children and Young People for Social Inclusion: Global approaches to empowerment, published by Routledge. Prieto-Flores will present the topic Necropolitics at the Southern European Border: Causes and Explanations for the Increasing Number of Migrant Deaths and Missing at Sea.

    Andrena Mason
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      ARIANA MANGUAL FIGUEROA, PH.D. | Author of Knowing Silence: How Children Talk About Immigration Status in School

      The Immigration Initiative at Harvard (IIH) fosters a community of scholars engaged in the exchange of research, ideas, and practices related to serving immigrant origin children, adolescents, and young adults.

      Our next special guest of the 2024 season, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, is an educational anthropologist who studies processes of language socialization within Latinx communities living in the United States. Her ethnographic research seeks to understand the ways in which the lives of children and adults in mixed-status families are shaped by citizenship status and schooling practices. Her work has appeared in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Language Policy, and the American Educational Research Journal. Her forthcoming book—Knowing Silence: How Children Talk About Immigration Status in School –– will be published in Appril 2024 by the University of Minnesota Press. She is the co-Principal Investigator of two longitudinal research projects: Putting Immigration and Education into Conversation Everyday (PIECE) funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation and the City University of New York-Initiative on Immigration and Education (CUNY-IIE, see http://www.cuny-iie.org). Prior to obtaining her Ph.D., she taught English as a Second Language and Spanish in public schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn.

       

      Andrena Mason
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        FRANCESCA MELONI, PH.D. | Author of Ways of Belonging: Undocumented Youth in the Shadow of Illegality

        The Immigration Initiative at Harvard (IIH) fosters a community of scholars engaged in the exchange of research, ideas, and practices related to serving immigrant origin children, adolescents, and young adults.

        Our first special guest of the 2024 season, Francesca Meloni, is Assistant Professor of Social Justice in the School of Education, Communication & Society at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the impact of legal status on the experiences of belonging and access to social services.

        Her talk, ‘Ways of Belonging: Undocumented Youth in the Shadow of Illegality,’ examines the experiences of belonging of undocumented young people who are made invisible and are excluded from K-12 schools in Montreal, Canada. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a participatory project on access to education, it asks questions about the “in-between” spaces inhabited by undocumented young people. How can we reconceptualize young people’s belonging beyond deficit assumptions? How are configurations of “illegality” experienced across different social spaces? And what is the role of ethnography in narrating the stories and the struggles of undocumented young people?

        Andrena Mason
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          Faculty Fireside Chat with Dr. Carola Suarez-Orozco

          View our Faculty Fireside Chat with Dr. Carola Suarez-Orozco, HGSE Professor in Residence. Dr. Suarez-Orozco discussed emerging evidence of how school climate measurements account (or don’t) for the experience of immigrant children.

          Andrena Mason
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            Maryam Kia-Keating (IIH Speaker Series)

            Saskias Casanova, Ph.D. | Diasporic Indigenous Students & Their Learning Environments

            Diasporic Indigenous students from Mexico attain cultural knowledge through transnational
            learning communities outside traditional K-12 classrooms. Educators are often unaware of the
            strengths these learning environments foster in these students. Using socio-ecological systems
            and critical Latinx Indigeneities (Blackwell et al., 2017) frameworks, Dr. Saskias Casanova
            highlights the intricate, collaborative, and intergenerational learning environments
            Indigenous Mexican students recreate and sustain across diasporic contexts.

            Casanova will share how these learning environments foster assets, such as agency,
            multilingualism, identity development, and a sense of belonging, which diasporic Indigenous
            students bring to their classrooms. Casanova will discuss incorporating decolonizing
            methodologies (Adams et al., 2015; Smith, 1999) in her research to center Indigenous youth
            voices and expand traditional psychological epistemologies. She will also recommend
            practices for cultivating positive learning environments that support diasporic Indigenous
            students and affirm their Indigenous worldviews to create more equitable educational
            experiences for these students.

            Andrena Mason
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              Maryam Kia-Keating, Ph.D. | Resilience Framing & Participatory Approaches In Research With Immigrant & Refugee Communities

              The ever-increasing millions of forcibly displaced persons around the globe is a call to action, to work towards stability, connection, and belonging in a world contending with collective uncertainty, unpredictability, and trauma. Dr. Kia-Keating challenges the notion that it is sufficient for trauma researchers to remain objective, static witnesses, reporting on suffering from a distant stance. In contrast, Kia-Keating describes a wave of activist scholarship, demanding that community priorities, cultural knowledge, and equity are upheld, and researchers themselves engage in cultural humility and ongoing critical self-reflection. Resting on the foundations of bioecological theory and drawing from the roots of critical consciousness, Kia-Keating offers guideposts for resilience framing and participatory methods in research approaches with immigrant and refugee communities.

              Andrena Mason
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                Kongji Qin, Ph.D & Soria Colomer, Ph.D | Navigating Racism & Xenophobia in U.S. Schools: Understanding Chinese Immigrant Parenting Identities and Practices

                The alarming increase of anti-Asian racial violence throughout the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of studying how Asian immigrant parents and children navigate and respond to these challenges. In this talk, we share our learning from an interview study with a group of Chinese immigrant parents that explored issues at the intersections of parenting identity, practices, and racism. Drawing on Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit) and racial literacy, we illustrate the complexity of their negotiation of parenting identity in relation to racialized ideologies and their challenges in addressing racism that their children encountered in schools. Our study highlights the critical need for developing immigrant parents’ racial literacy and for institutional responses from schools to act upon racism and discrimination.

                Academic Web Pages
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                  Sita Patel, Ph.D. | Improving mental health among newcomer youth through school-based community partnerships

                  This presentation by Professor Sita Patel at the Palo Alto University and Global Mental Health Fellow for WHO, will share several field examples to illustrate common challenges and best practices for conducting school-based research that aims to better understand and improve newcomer youth mental health. Schools provide an accessible, common ground for the delivery of mental health services for newly arrived immigrant children and adolescents. Given competing demands and limited resources in many schools, it is vital to consider ways to optimize community engagement, youth outcomes, and program longevity.

                  Academic Web Pages
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                    DACA Moving Forward: What Can We Expect? 

                    On Monday, Nov 14th 10:30 EST,   the Immigration Imitative at Harvard will host a panel discussion on

                    DACA Moving Forward: What Can We Expect? with panelists:

                    • Andrew Selee, President of the Migration Policy Institute.
                    • Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, Director of Federal Advocacy at United We Dream
                    • Javier Juarez, Senior Director of Advancement for the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition
                    • Jason Corral, Staff attorney for the Harvard Representation Initiative

                    Moderated by Carola Suárez-Orozco, Director Immigration Initiative at Harvard

                    Academic Web Pages
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                      Marta Rodriguez, Ph.D. | Stereotype and stigma in the school (re)insertion of children of deported parents

                      Marta Rodríguez-Cruz is a Professor and Researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Seville and a Visiting Professor at the Center for Mexican Studies UNAM-Boston.