Doctoral Dissertation Research: Transnational Family Movements

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Security concerns increasingly shape local as well as transnational debates. The research supported by this award examines how these debates affect understandings of the role of the family. Family cultures are usually understood to be rooted in particular practices and places, but efforts to securitize the family in crisis contexts may take on common characteristics. Therefore, to understand what is happening in the United States, a comparative perspective is required. This project leverages ethnography's unique capacity for combining deep listening with social analysis to better understand the conceptualizations and concerns that motivate family-focused security movements. The research will take place primarily in Mexico, with shorter trips to other sites where security crises and significant family movements have emerged in recent years. The researcher will collect data through archival research to trace the history of these movements; textual analyses of media accounts; participant observation at multiple sites and across organizational scales; interviews; social network analysis; and GIS and timeline mapping of the global circulation of ideas about the family. These data will be analyzed to understand the historical, cultural, and geopolitical significance of individual family movement cases and how they connect to larger transnational developments. 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.