Doctoral Dissertation Research: Marital States: Kinship and Citizenship in Jordan

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Stanford University doctoral candidate Eda Pepi, supervised by Dr. Sylvia Yanagisako, will undertake research on the reproduction of statelessness through nationality laws in Jordan that prohibit Jordanian women married to noncitizen Palestinian men from passing their Jordanian citizenship to their children or spouses, thereby rendering these children stateless. Pepi will conduct twelve months of field research in the city of Amman, Jordan, focusing on the effects of such laws on mixed families and on attempts by the Jordanian state to regulate family life for Palestinians and Jordanians alike. Through a research design involving social science methods such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, inter-generational family discussions, life histories, and archival research, as well as through dispute processing and content analysis, Pepi will gather data about the practices of two kinds of mixed families: "stateless families" (Jordanian women married to non-citizen Palestinian men -- couples whose children are stateless) and "citizen families" (Jordanian men married to Palestinian women -- couples whose children are citizens). This research will shed light on the effects of state regulation on family life and on the ways that families cope with the differential effects of state regulations. This project will make a contribution to the anthropology of statelessness, the extant scholarship of which is limited to a few policy studies that do not adequately treat questions of kinship and gender as integral to inquiries into citizenship, sovereignty, and statelessness. The project frames family life as an important site of sovereignty in action where the state is constituted. This research is also important because it will inform policymakers about the everyday lives of stateless individuals, of whom there are over 15 million in the world. Funding for this research also supports the training of a social scientist.