04/16/2024 - IIH/SOC MIGRATION WORKSHOP SPEAKER SERIES: The New Minority People without a Migration Background in the Superdiverse City with Dr. Maurice Crul & Frans Lelie
How do people without a migration background appreciate diversity and participate in majority-minority neighborhoods? Maurice Crul, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & Frans Lelie, Visiting Fellow in Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, have studied the participation and integration of people with a migration background in ethnically diverse city contexts. The ‘forgotten’ group in assimilation and integration research, up till recently, were the people without a migration background. This one-sided perspective has translated into major empirical and theoretical flaws in how we study social processes in ethnically diverse contexts. Without studying the diversity attitudes and practices of people without a migration background we miss out on the impact of the actions of the most powerful group in society. To tackle this, we developed the Integration into Diversity (ID) Theory as an alternative for existing assimilation theories and to measure the impact of people without a migration background on the diversity climate in neighborhoods and cities. In the European comparative project Becoming a Minority (BaM) we have interviewed people without a migration background in majority-minority neighborhoods in six European cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Vienna, Antwerp and Malmö). We will show what needs to be in place for diverse neighborhoods to work and to foster a successful practice of living together. This work provides important lessons for a progressive agenda for ethnically diverse cities, countering the increasing anti-immigrant discourse in Europe and the United States. Join us and get the book, The New Minority, People without a Migration Background in the Superdiverse City, here.
02/20/2024 - 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.
02/06/2024 - 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.
01/23/2024 - 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?
11/16/2023 - 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.
11/14/2023 - 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.
10/17/2023 - 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.
04/10/2023 - 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.
12/05/2022 - 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.
11/04/2022 - 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
10/31/2022 - 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.
10/17/2022 - Panel: Supporting immigrant-origin students in US public school districts: Reflections from a mixed-methods research study
This interdisciplinary research team will present key insights from an ongoing mixed-methods research study of educator practices in 6 immigrant-serving school districts in distinct contexts of reception. They will share an overview of our project, present insights from three key analyses, and reflect on our partnership with district leaders to document and develop promising practices to support immigrant-origin students.
Presenters:
Dr. Rebecca Lowenhaupt (co-PI; Boston College)Dr Ariana Mangual Figueroa (CUNY Graduate Center).Paulette Andrade Gonzalez (Boston College)Jennifer Queenan (CUNY Graduate Center)Edom Tesfa (Harvard University)
Open to all but please register ahead!
10/05/2022 - Sophia Rodriguez, Ph.D. | We learn about who we are: Community-based organizations as spaces of belonging for newcomer unaccompanied immigrant youth and research dilemmas.
Prof. Sophia Rodriguez of UMD will speak on “We learn about who we are…”: Community-based organizations as spaces of belonging for newcomer unaccompanied immigrant youth and research dilemmas” for the kick-off 2022/23 IIH Colloquium. To watch the recording, please click here.
08/15/2022 - Panel: America’s Immigration Debate
Listen to a discussion with a panel of immigration experts moderated by Robert Siegel (host of NPR’s All Things Considered for 31 years) on the prospects of immigration reform:
- Doris Meissner (Migration Policy Institute)
- Carola Suárez-Orozco (Immigration Initiative at Harvard)
- Dr. Norman Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute)
- Julia Preston (The Marshall Project)
Aired June 2022 Global Connections aired by American Friends of Rabin Medical Center (AFRMC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization established in 1995 and located in New York City.
07/26/2022 - Michael Jones-Correa, Ph.D. | Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants
Michael Jones-Correa, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract: Have the policies and rhetoric of Trump’s candidacy and administration undermined immigrants’ trajectories of political inclusion? Drawing from original surveys of Latino immigrants spanning the period Trump won the Republican nomination, to when he was elected to the presidency and took office, charts patterns of civic resilience and withdrawal among these foreign-born residents, both citizens and non-citizens. However, despite the rhetoric and policy threat of Trump’s candidacy and presidency, this research finds Latino immigrants demonstrate far more civic resilience than withdrawal.
Speaker bio: Michael Jones-Correa is President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration (CSERI). He is author of Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants(Russell Sage Foundation). His research centers on the topics of immigrant political incorporation and ethnic and racial relations in the United States, often writing about political behavior in the context of institutional structures.
10/23/2020 - Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants
Michael Jones-Correa is President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration (CSERI). He is author of Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants (Russell Sage Foundation). His research centers on the topics of immigrant political incorporation and ethnic and racial relations in the United States, often writing about political behavior in the context of institutional structures.Michael Jones-Correa is President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration (CSERI). He is author of Holding Fast: Resilience and Civic Engagement Among Latino Immigrants (Russell Sage Foundation). His research centers on the topics of immigrant political incorporation and ethnic and racial relations in the United States, often writing about political behavior in the context of institutional structures.
10/07/2020 - Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, with Tahseen Shams
Challenging the commonly held perception that immigrants’ lives are shaped exclusively by their sending and receiving countries, Here, There, and Elsewhere breaks new ground by showing how immigrants are vectors of globalization who both produce and experience the interconnectedness of societies—not only the societies of origin and destination, but also, the societies in places beyond. Tahseen Shams posits a new concept for thinking about these places that are neither the immigrants’ homeland nor hostland—the “elsewhere.” Drawing on rich ethnographic data, interviews, and analysis of the social media activities of South Asian Muslim Americans, Shams uncovers how different dimensions of the immigrants’ ethnic and religious identities connect them to different elsewheres in places as far-ranging as the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Yet not all places in the world are elsewheres. How a faraway foreign land becomes salient to the immigrant’s sense of self depends on an interplay of global hierarchies, homeland politics, and hostland dynamics. Referencing today’s 24-hour news cycle and the ways that social media connects diverse places and peoples at the touch of a screen, Shams traces how the homeland, hostland, and elsewhere combine to affect the ways in which immigrants and their descendants understand themselves and are understood by others.
09/30/2020 - The Mobility Pathways of Migrant Domestic Workers with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
This talk examines the mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers in order to interrogate the possibilities of socio-economic mobility allowed by their migration in a stratified global labor market. Drawing from 85 in-depth interviews conducted with Filipino migrant domestic workers employed in the key destination of the United Arab Emirates, this talk identifies three salient mobility pathways of serial migration, staggered migration and return migration. It revisits our understanding in labor migration studies of the intersections of social and spatial mobility as it first establishes the salience of multi-national migrations, thus disrupting the assumption of the continuous settlement of migrants in any one destination, and second illustrates the social reproduction of poverty for unskilled migrant workers, thus dispelling the notion that migration offers an inevitable path to socio-economic mobility.
