State-created Categories, Displacements and Possibilities from the Margins: A conversation with demography
Abstract: This panel discussion is based on Menjívar’s ASA presidential address. She argues for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through classification systems based on rules and regulations, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. She proposes adopting a critical perspective when using state-created and formalized categories in our research, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that create both state classification systems and enduring patterns of inequality. This approach can reframe questions about the people sorted into the categories we use in our work.
Panelists:
Dr. Cecilia Menjivar holds the Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She specializes in immigration, gender, family dynamics, social networks, religious institutions, and broad conceptualizations of violence. She focuses on two main areas: the impacts of the immigration regime and laws on immigrants and the effects of living in contexts of multisided violence on individuals, especially women. Her work on immigration concerns mainly the United States, where she focuses on Central American immigrants, whereas her work on violence is centered on Latin America, mostly Central America. Menjívar is interested in how state power manifests itself through legal regimes and formal institutions and bureaucracies to shape microprocesses in everyday life.
Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic & Racial Studies, among other journals. Her most recent publications include the edited volume, Constructing Immigrant Illegality: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses (Cambridge, 2014), the book, Immigrant Families (Polity 2016), and the edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Immigration Crises (Oxford, 2019).
Dr. Cecilia Menjívar co-authored an amicus brief in the consolidated DACA cases before the U.S. Supreme Court along with a dozen other prominent empirical scholars who study DACA and its effects. One of her many prominent publications includes “Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America” (California, 2000), which was the winner of the William J. Goode Outstanding book award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association, Honorable Mention from the International Migration Section, and a Choice Outstanding Title. Other publications include “Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala” (California, 2011). She is co-editor of Constructing Immigrant “Illegality”: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses (Cambridge, 2014), Latinos/as in the United States: Changing the Face of América (Springer 2008), and When States Kill: Latin America, the US, and Technologies of Terror (Texas, 2005).
Dr. Randall Kuhn (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1999) is a demographer and sociologist focused on the social determinants of health among vulnerable populations. He is an expert in survey design, longitudinal analysis and counterfactual research design. In the field of migration and health, Kuhn has designed new approaches to estimating the impact of migration on health. In global health, Kuhn leads a 35-year longitudinal study of the impact of health and development programs in Bangladesh. In the area of homelessness, Kuhn conducted some of the earliest quantitative research on health and substance use risks among chronically homeless adults. He co-authored recent reports on homelessness and the coronavirus outbreak for the National Alliance to End Homelessness and on health and homelessness in Los Angeles. He currently leads or co-leads new studies that use mobile phones to measure the well-being of unhoused and recently-housed populations. To learn more, visit: https://www.homelessresearch.akidolabs.com/.
Kuhn is a fellow of the California Center for Population Research, where he serves as Chair of the Executive Committee. He also serves on the advisory boards of the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Kuhn previously chaired the Population Sciences Subcommittee of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. For 10 years Kuhn was Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver, where he developed an innovative curriculum, tripled enrollments, and built a programmatic emphasis on the health and human rights of disabled, LGBTQ, indigenous, and migrant populations as an essential component of achieving global health justice and equity. Kuhn founded the Goal 18 campaign for inclusive UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Dr. Desi Small-Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has partnered with Indigenous communities in the U.S. and internationally as a researcher and data advocate for more than ten years.
Desi’s research examines the intersection of race, indigeneity, data, and inequality. With a focus on Indigenous futures, her current research explores the racialization of Indigenous identity and group boundary making, Indigenous population statistics, and data for health and economic justice on Indian Reservations.
Desi directs the Data Warriors Lab, an Indigenous social science laboratory. She is the Co-Founder of the U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network, which helps ensure that data for and about Indigenous nations and peoples in the U.S. (American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians) are utilized to advance Indigenous aspirations for collective and individual wellbeing. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Database. She is a proud alumna of the University of Arizona (Ph.D. Sociology), University of Waikato (Ph.D. Demography), Stanford University (B.A. and M.A.).
Faculty host:
Abel Valenzuela Jr. is a professor of Urban Planning and Chicana/o Studies and the former director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. As of 2022, Professor Valenzuela serves as interim dean for UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences. Professor Valenzuela is one of the leading national experts on day labor and has published numerous articles and technical reports on the subject. His research interests include precarious labor markets, worker centers, immigrant workers, and Los Angeles. His academic base is urban sociology, planning, and labor studies. In addition to the topic of day labor, he has published numerous articles on immigrant settlement, labor market outcomes, urban poverty and inequality, including co-editing (with Lawrence Bobo, Melvin Oliver, and Jim Johnson) Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2000, Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence (with Ramiro Martinez Jr.). He has also published in American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Annual Review of Sociology, New England Journal of Public Policy, Working USA: a Journal of Labor and Society, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, and Regional Studies. Dr. Valenzuela earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.C.P. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Venice Beach with his wife and three sons.
