Doctoral Dissertation Research: Temporality and Changing Parameters of Citizenship

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

What does it mean to be a citizen in the contemporary world? Guest worker programs, refugee status, and other forms of protected but temporary legal status challenge traditional expectations of national belonging. Ambiguous populations can appear to fall through the cracks. This creates problems for policy makers who need to protect a nation's sovereignty and also be responsive to economic and humanitarian demands. It can also be an obstacle for social scientists seeking to develop new understandings of the dynamics of changing relationships between people and places. The research funded by this award takes up the challenge of this difficult problem by using intensive ethnographic methods to build new practical and theoretical understandings of citizenship from the ground up. The research will be conducted by University of California, Irvine, anthropology doctoral candidate Jennifer A. Zelnick, who is supervised by Dr. Eleana Kim. The focal population will be people of Cambodian origin, some of whom are legally resident in Long Beach, California, and some of whom have been involuntarily relocated back to Cambodia. This shifting residency makes them appropriate for research on the ambiguities of national belonging and the consequences of these ambiguities. The researcher will conduct her investigation in both sites. She will pay particular attention to socio-demographics, movement histories, official and bureaucratic encounters, and family and social networks. Data will be collected through participant observation, interviews, kinship mapping, and archival research. Findings from this research will produce the rich, micro-level data needed by both policy makers and social scientists to understand the nature and limits of citizenship in the world today. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.