Matching Items (10)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Immigration
- All Subjects: Feminist Methodology
- All Subjects: Housing
- Creators: Colbern, Allan
- Status: Published
Description
This project seeks to explore how organizations work toward refugee and immigrant integration through forming different types of coalitions and strategic networks. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to identify when coalitions emerge between refugee organizations and immigrant rights groups in order to examine their development, from how the coalitions broadly conceive of refugee and immigrant rights, to how they organize resources and information sharing, service provision, policy advocacy, and policy implementation. The project is guided by the question: What explains the formation of coalitions that advocate for both immigrant rights and refugee rights? Through examining the formation and development of these coalitions, this thesis engages at the intersections of immigration federalism, refugee studies and human rights scholarship to reveal deeper complexities in the politics of immigrant integration. The project sharpens these three scholarly intersections by three multi-level jurisdictions – California and Arizona in the United States and Athens in Greece – and by employing comparative analysis to unpack how national governments and federalism dynamics shape coalition building around immigrant integration.
ContributorsAmoroso-Pohl, Melanie Hope (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Keahey, Jennifer (Committee member) / Walker, Shawn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
The current immigration flow to the United States from Mexico has been polarized by politicians and anti-immigration groups, with a rhetoric that immigrants are a danger to the sovereignty of the country and an economic burden. These accusations ignore the role played by trade agreements in causing such migration patterns by displacing Mexican migrants and how U.S. immigration policies subsequently condemn these economically displaced migrants into illegality. This thesis examines the role national governments and laws of both the United States and Mexico play in formalizing the undocumented flow and the contestation of these economic migrants. I challenge the contemporary view of trade agreements as pull factors by showing how they also function as problematic push factors of migration through displacing Mexicans from their land and any meaningful form of economic security. Once displaced, these communities seek opportunities by migrating to the U.S., where they cross into illegality. Together, examining displacement and subsequent illegality, this thesis reveals the problematic, yet hidden role played by trade agreements in Mexican migration to the U.S. and gaps in current U.S. immigration laws that has preserved the injustices created when neoliberal economic policies and immigration politics provide no protection to impacted indigenous communities.
ContributorsValenzuela, Cinthia (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Comstock, Audrey (Committee member) / Elenes, C Alejandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Madness is disruptive. It doesn't play by the rules. Madness is influenced, created, and caused by many different factors; it can be at different times disorienting, debilitating, or a space of radical potential. In this thesis, I argue for the empowering potential of narrative and rewriting identity in the face of painful disruptions. I argue that the way that we conceptualize madness and how we internalize trauma affects how we reconfigure identity as an ongoing process and therefore whether and how we are able to embrace creative, diverse and dynamically empowered futures. I argue against positivist traditions of categorization and concept formation when it comes to madness – whether medical or historic//cultural/social. I first use similar tools to “categorize the categorizers” and later break away from positivist tradition through feminist inquiry, pushing against static, linear, and inactive kind and family conceptual hierarchies with my own experience. I use active feminist frameworks and phenomenological ontologies to argue for a corrective epistemic justice exposing reductive gaps in the literature and highlighting the links between violence/oppression/trauma/agency and mental illness that positivist models minimize. I employ personal experiences of gender-based violence and my own changing and intersectional understanding and experience of depression and mental health as a lens through which different pathways can emerge. I use memoir as method to disturb the binary limitations of madness models, instead offering a conceptualization of madness as fluid, intersectional, changing, and deeply personal: an experience that cannot be reduced and compartmentalized. Finally, I explore the pain of trauma and madness as well as the possibility therein towards action as a way of reclaiming self-agency.
ContributorsTownsley, Rebecca (Author) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Muphy-Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Colbern, Allan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
In the past decade, a significant shift has emerged around immigration policy, as advocates and policymakers have made various efforts to pass state and local policies related to immigrant integration or restrictions. This thesis offers original insights into current dynamics in immigration federalism through interviews with lawmakers and community activists in Arizona, a leading state when it comes to restricting the lives of undocumented immigrants. Advancing a new framework that connects the lived experience of officials and activists to partisanship, policy, key events, demographics, and racializing events, this thesis bridges isolated bodies of scholarship on immigration and seeks to demonstrate how every person (not just immigrant) are part of America’s current challenges to become a more inclusive nation of immigrants.
ContributorsNeville, Christopher Francis (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis director) / Martinez-Orosco, Rafael (Committee member) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
To investigate the impacts of an energy efficiency retrofit, indoor air quality and resident health were evaluated at a low‐income senior housing apartment complex in Phoenix, Arizona, before and after a green energy building renovation. Indoor and outdoor air quality sampling was carried out simultaneously with a questionnaire to characterize personal habits and general health of residents. Measured indoor formaldehyde levels before the building retrofit routinely exceeded reference exposure limits, but in the long‐term follow‐up sampling, indoor formaldehyde decreased for the entire study population by a statistically significant margin. Indoor PM levels were dominated by fine particles and showed a statistically significant decrease in the long‐term follow‐up sampling within certain resident subpopulations (i.e. residents who report smoking and residents who had lived longer at the apartment complex).
ContributorsFrey, S.E. (Author) / Destaillats, H. (Author) / Cohn, S. (Author) / Ahrentzen, S. (Author) / Fraser, M.P. (Author)
Created2015
Description
This study analyzes the role of bipartisan coalitions in creating exclusionary, enforcement focused immigration policy. First, the thesis covers the history of federal immigration law and connects this to critical migration scholarship, which emphasizes the racialization of migration controls and enforcement regimes, by highlighting the growing federal categories of immigrant illegality and criminality. Next, the thesis develops an original framework that builds on prior scholarship in political science to systematically connect coalition building and the Democratic party’s complicity as a cause of this growing regime. Specifically, the thesis applies a coalition building analysis of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, with special focus given to how the president, congressional leaders, and interest groups, in the 1980s. A key finding is that both political parties pushed the enforcement narrative and played key roles to enact employment verification into federal immigration law. The thesis connects this finding to critiques about the two-party political system as well as scholarship that exposes the injustice of U.S. immigration enforcement regime that continued to grow in the interior, at the border, and globally.
ContributorsGoodnight, Ronald Eugene (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Firoz, Malay (Committee member) / Behl, Natasha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The United States of America incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, with the rate of growth for the imprisonment for women being currently twice that of men. Despite these alarming numbers women are often deemed the forgotten population within the carceral system. Using feminist inquiry within an interpretivist framework, I employ an autoethnographic account to examine my experience as a volunteer educator within the American Prison system. The 'data' within the autoethnography include my thoughts, eventualities, and reflections that are analyzed through an iterative cycle. Due to the creative nature of this thesis, 'data' are represented through a series of concepts, including art, photographs, and shifting narratives that mediate the language between theory and the lived experiences of incarcerated women. The data within this thesis however are not mine alone, they are cogenerated with the women of the Perryville Correctional Facility. Using feminist-based practices the representations of incarcerated women come from the women themselves , thus serving as a method of survival, as a form of activism, and as a tool of healing and justice that is not linked to reform. This thesis serves to simultaneously challenge and contribute to the traditional scholarship surrounding female incarceration by centering the voices of incarcerated women, and in turn serving as a form of liberatory action.
ContributorsTrickey, Hayley Louise (Author) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Murphy Erfarni, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
There are many historical inequities regarding housing in the United States, such as the lack of access to affordable and secure housing for people of color, which is a result of centuries of exclusion. These problems remain ineffectively addressed or unaddressed by policy. Indeed, many community-based organizations report that housing policies fail to address the needs of the people—especially those in marginalized communities. Top-down approaches are efficient and more broadly applicable but miss important community-specific problems. Meanwhile, bottom-up approaches excel in highlighting community perspectives and the lived experiences of residents, but they are challenging to generalize across jurisdictions. This thesis captures community-based understandings of policy through in-depth interviews with community-based organizations (CBOs) and applies these understandings to develop a new quantitative framework for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of housing policies that can be applied across the United States. The thesis also explores various housing policies through a multi-dimensional, intersectional, and forward-thinking analysis that centers marginalized communities.
ContributorsMoen, Anders Jacob (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Pfeiffer, Deirdre (Committee member) / Lee, Sangmi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This paper assesses the obstacles faced by immigrant aid groups on the U.S./ Mexico border and the resiliency used to challenge these obstacles. The borderlands of the United States and Mexico is a unique landscape for activists and humanitarians to work given the prevalence and amount of entities that police the area and the suspension of certain constitutional protections. The criminalization of activists on the border provides a unique lens in understanding how social movements and nation-building are linked to immigration in the United States. This research aims to provide a rich description of what criminalization is and how it plays out between the government and activist groups along the border. My findings critique the United States and its claim that it is a liberal democracy because it breaks norms and international laws in its assault against activists and humanitarians, many of whom are U.S. citizens. This attack further demonstrates that the violence migrants endure on the border is not just an unfortunate side effect of border policies but very much intentional and by design. In addition to criminalizing activists, this thesis examines the activists’ mental health and exhaustion as they relate to their humanitarian work and how this is also intentional violence the U.S. Government inflicts in order to maintain itself as a nation-state.
ContributorsRoether, Nichole (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Firoz, Malay (Committee member) / Redeker-Hepner, Tricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This study explores how a teen center within a local police department in California impacts the lives of local Latinx youth. Through a mixed methods approach of surveys, focus groups, and interviews, the study explores Mexican American youth, the most populous Latinx youth in the United States who are uniquely challenged by varying immigration statuses, mental health, and academic barriers. Theoretically, the study draws out intersections unique to the Latinx youth experiences growing up in America and engages in inter-disciplinary debates about inequities in health and education and policing practices. These intersections and debates are addressed through in-depth qualitative analysis of three participant groups: current youth participants of the teen center’s Youth Leadership Council (YLC), alumni of the YLC, and adult decision makers of the program. Pre- and post-surveys and focus groups are conducted with the youth participants over the span of a full year, while they take part in the teen center program, capturing how the teen center directly impacts their academic achievements, feelings of belonging, mental health, and attitudes towards law enforcement, over time. Interviews with alumni and key decision makers of the teen center further reveal broader patters in how the YLC program positively impacts the lives of Latinx youth and the challenges it faces when federal immigration enforcement complicates local policy relations with local communities.
ContributorsGutierrez, Courtney Amanda (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Cuadraz, Gloria (Committee member) / Lopez, Kristina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019