Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper demonstrates that dominant approaches to Mexican immigrant construction workers obscure the nature of workplace discrimination. In defining the problems of occupational risk, health and safety specialists emphasize Mexican immigrant workers’ deficiencies. In contrast, workers emphasized workplace discrimination and legal vulnerability. This paper argues that health and safety specialists’ outreach to Mexican immigrant workers not only obscure experiences of discrimination and vulnerability, but also facilitate structural inequality. These perspectives were particularly evident and “hazardous” in the case of a post-disaster New Orleans as Mexican immigrants working in cleanup and recovery work found themselves physically and symbolically injured by a broader political discourse to “Bring New Orleans Back.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is interested in the question of how social actors negotiate their racial/ethnic, gender, and class identities in relation to their citizen identity in a specific spatio-temporal context. More specifically, it looks at how the process of identity negotiations takes place under a neoliberal economic ideology in an integrated global economy. By examining the WTO protest in Hong Kong and Hong Kong Disneyland, it is argued that the British colonial government-designed “Hong Kong Chinese” identity has been employed by the state even after decolonisation to justify the free market policies of this city-state. New international division of labour however probes to question naturalised social relations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: On May 1, 2006, millions of immigrants in America, primarily the undocumented, went on strike from jobs and schools and marched in protest of current and potential immigration laws that threatened deportation, kept the undocumented without civil liberties, and risked the break-up of families containing some citizens (usually children) and their parents. Called “A Day Without Immigrants,” the protests were unprecedented in American History, revealing a massive but vulnerable population willing to identify themselves publicly in white shirts, signifying non-violence and, not insignificantly, a transnational virtue that has long been understood in America as the requisite for access to the full fruits of democracy. On its face, one could imagine that this was a political event, but one would have had to have missed the vital religious leadership and ideology behind it.

This paper looks especially at the ties between this immigrant activism and the larger public’s response to “Strangers No Longer: Together on a Journey of Hope,” a joint pastoral letter sent out in 2003 by a combination of Mexican and American Bishops, and quickly adopted by most of the National Catholic hierarchy in America. The document is extraordinary on many fronts, making clear for instance that Catholic “social teaching” in America is increasingly using the language and praxis of liberation theology, a theology drawn especially from Latin Americans in the U.S... Perhaps most important for this paper, the document also questions America’s right to “sovereign” borders, when the use of those borders is to keep the poor away from the wealth of other nations. Not only do they argue that welcoming migrants should be a religious concern for Catholics and other religious people alike, but they suggest as well that it is our duty to provide sanctuary, food, social services, jobs, and to work for the civil rights of these migrants, especially if the state deems them illegal.

Using narratives from immigrants themselves, evidence of the use of liberation theology by immigrants and church leaders, and showing the artwork/posters that signify support for this activism, I’d like to interrogate how precisely we might question the sacred/secular divide in this case. An unnuanced reading might suggest that the sovereignty of borders, and the rights of states to institute and protect them, are a state or secular issue. As these movements show, however, the Catholic Church as a global institution is defining that right as limited, and immigrants of many religions are joining the movement with a similar understanding that what had once been an undoubtedly secular domain must now be challenged by an undoubtedly sacred cosmology.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A methodological divide plagues terrorism research. Quantitative and qualitative researchers have drawn mutually exclusive conclusions regarding the root causes of the terrorism. In an attempt to help resolve this conflict, this paper assesses the reliability of the data used by statistical researchers of terrorism. The results demonstrate that issues of construct validity limit the reliability of regression analysis in the field of terrorism; unless quantitative researchers make significant changes in the way they operationalize dependent and independent variables, their work will remain misleading. Ultimately, statistical analysis of terrorism must be paired with other methodologies in order to provide the context necessary to understand raw quantitative data.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Regulations that protect against threats to public health and safety have come under attack as inconsistent with democratic claims. The resulting debate has been unproductive, teetering between calls of ‘not enough’ or ‘too much’ democracy, and ‘not enough’ or ‘too much’ science, in the cycles of regulatory anxiety, reactivity, inefficacy, doubt, and insecurity that pit science, law, the administrative process, interest politics, and public demands against one another. Given less attention is the constitutive effect of this boundary-crossing conversation and conflict among stakeholder constructions of risk. This paper, accordingly, asks two questions: First, to what ways of knowing—scientific, legal, political, organizational, or lay—are constructions of public health risk obedient, and why? Second, what are the constitutive implications of risk regulation’s juggling act for the construction and representation of norms and expectations of democratic citizenship? I explore these questions in a study of the Healthy People initiative, a project that enlists federal and state public health agencies and non-governmental community organizations in preventive action against a series of national health priorities.