Amount Awarded: $25,000
Who is a refugee, who is an immigrant, and who is a native? These are critical questions at a time when nation-states are tightening and manipulating their borders and increasingly criminalizing subject mobility, and thus these designations are alternatively cast as aspersions or grounded as the basis of claims. Refugees, immigrants, and natives - whether indigenous persons or not - are typically constructed as separate legal and social categories, and thus studied in isolation from one another. This interdisciplinary research project will examine how these as communities, and the fields of studies developed to examine them, in fact converge, displace, and shape each other. We will research how legal regimes and cultural concepts produce categories that determine the corresponding legal entitlements and cultural claims based on membership in these categories. We are particularly interested in how gender is construed in discourse and policy, and the particular burdens placed upon women and families. With this innovative approach, we will examine how these categories are constructed and contingent, with ramifications for both scholarly thought and public policy.