This talk is co-sponsored with Sociology and the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program. David FitzGerald will be giving a talk on his new book, Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers.
- Explores why 99% of refugees can only find safety in the prosperous democracies of the Global North by asking for asylum after they arrive
- Describes how governments have developed increasingly elaborate techniques of remote control to keep asylum seekers away from spaces where they can ask for sanctuary
- Uses American diplomatic cables from the 2000s released by WikiLeaks and declassified CIA documents from the 1960s through early 1980s provide an unprecedented window into policymaking behind the scenes
Leela Fernandes studies the relationship between politics and culture through both qualitative empirical research and theoretical scholarship. Her research examines the ways in which cultural meanings, practices and identities shape political behavior and deepen our explanations of political conflicts and processes. She has pursued this research agenda through extensive field research on labor politics, democratization and the politics of economic reform in India. Her focus on identity, culture and politics has led her to work extensively on qualitative and interdisciplinary methods including ethnographic and interpretive methods.
A central dimension of Professor Fernandes’ research is the study of gender in shaping cultural, economic and political processes. She has worked on theories of intersectionality and has also examined the gendered dimensions of nationalism and transnationalism. An ongoing foundation of Professor Fernandes’ research is the study of social inequality with a particular emphasis on researching and theorizing class identity and inequality.
Leela Fernandes recently finished two books. Transnational Feminism in the United States engages in a critical discussion of interdisciplinary research and theory on transnationalism. She also edited the Routledge Handbook on Gender and South Asia which provides a broad overview of feminist scholarship on South Asia drawing on the work of twenty three scholars from South Asia, Europe and North America. She is currently working on a new research project, The Politics of Water: Inequality and India’s Post-Liberalization State which analyzes changes in the state and the emergence of new forms of inequality through a study of the water sector in contemporary India.
Monica Bell is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her areas of expertise include criminal justice, welfare law, housing, race and the law, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology. Some of her recent work has been published in The Yale Law Journal, Law & Society Review, Social Service Review, and the Annual Review of Law & Social Science. She has also published work in popular outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Washington Post.
Before joining the Yale Law School faculty, Bell was a Climenko Fellow & Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She previously served as a Liman Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where she worked on matters related to cash assistance to families and disabled adults, child support, unemployment insurance, homeless services, healthcare, and other legal and policy issues affecting low-income women and families. Bell clerked for the Honorable Cameron McGowan Currie of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina. A first-generation college graduate from South Carolina’s Upcountry, Bell holds degrees from Furman University (Truman Scholar), University College Dublin (Mitchell Scholar), Yale Law School, and Harvard University.
Cosponsored by Hopkins Population Center and Department of Sociology
Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke and the director of the Polarization Lab. His research examines political polarization, culture and social psychology using tools from the field of computational social science (e.g. digital trace data from social media sites, automated text analysis, and machine learning)
Chris is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Carnegie Fellowship, and numerous awards from scholarly associations. His work has been published by The New York Times, Princeton University Press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Sociological Review, and other leading publications. Funding for his work has been provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research has also been covered by major media outlets such as the New York Times, NBC News, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and the BBC.
Chris is the Editor of the Oxford University Press Series in Computational Social Science and the co-founder of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, which are free training events designed to introduce junior scholars to the field that are held concurrently in seven universities around the world each year. Chris also serves on the Advisory Council to the National Science Foundation’s Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, and helped create Duke’s Interdisciplinary Data Science Program.