Research Activities
Guided by the insight that the consequences of the erosion of the barriers between the international and the local can best be studied in specific localities, we propose a research program that will operate at the intersection of community studies, the sociology of immigration, racial and ethnic politics, transnational studies, and international relations. Only through such an unusually interdisciplinary approach can we fully appreciate the effect of global processes on all levels of government and society in the United States.
It is vital for scholars to understand how immigrants deploy their transnational connections and home-country political orientations in specific U.S. contexts, how the political culture in local communities affects immigrant activism, and how people in these localities react to these new forms of identity and action. Through a series of investigations that link receiving cities, transnational groups, and countries of origin, we will seek to understand how global dynamics affect local change in both home and host countries. The program will consider the more conventional forms of political organization such as voting patterns and participation in electoral processes, but it will complement this with analyses of community organizing, social and protest movements, diasporan politics, and other forms of engagement in civil society.
The research will pay special attention to how home-country political experiences shape immigrant community activism and contribution to U.S. local politics. In additional to the more common economic motivations for migration, this program will also be sensitive to the fact that migrants are often escaping collapsing state authority, authoritarian regimes, and political turmoil. Their home country political affinities can be a resource for, or an impediment to, incorporation in their chosen destinations.
As a spillover, the program will also aim to assist these communities to articulate their needs and goals and to inform policy-making efforts designed to serve these communities. Local community organizations are a primary mechanism through which those who are marginalized due to race, class, ethnicity and gender-based discrimination can collectively press for social change; therefore it is important to understand immigrant community activism and leadership in these organizations. The vitality and effectiveness of community groups and organizations, the responsiveness of local government, and the overall political opportunity structure of a locality are good indicators of the potential for social action, citizen engagement, community cohesiveness and accountability.
Research projects will construct new relationships between researchers and immigrant communities and enhance the work that local, state, federal, and international organizations undertake with these populations. This effort will build upon research already under way at The Graduate Center on neighborhood social organization and development, community involvement in policy formation and implementation, immigration and immigrant political participation, and refugees and displaced peoples.
Some sample research questions include:
- How are these immigrant communities organizing and around what issues? How is that organization shaped by the specific neighborhood and city context provided by the New York region? What relationships have they formed with more traditional urban political actors? What relations, if any, have they formed with each other?
- What American civic structures, if any, have encouraged immigrants to become politically and socially active and what structures may have impeded their mobilization?
- How do the international system and sending country politics shape the way that each of these groups have chosen to become active? What kind of political relationships does each of these groups maintain with the governments of their home countries?
- How does the American role in the international system shape the way local political elites and native political groups respond to immigrant community organization?
- How do transnational practices of these groups provide resources or create barriers for their political mobilization?
It is not possible to fully understand how these communities will evolve without tearing down some of the disciplinary walls that have previously divided the fields of urban politics, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. Marilyn Gittell, Director of the Howard Samuels Center, has led many studies of the empowerment of minority communities, most recently an evaluation of the Ford Foundation's efforts, with a focus on Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, among others. John Mollenkopf, Director of the Center for Urban Research, is principal investigator of the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York study, which has examined the life trajectories and civic involvements of young people with Dominican, Colombian, West Indian, Chinese, and Russian immigrant parents. He has also studied patterns of immigrant political incorporation in New York and Los Angeles. Thomas G. Weiss, Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, has researched civil wars along with humanitarian and human rights issues arising within the sending societies and the role of international organizations in seeking to manage the resulting displacements, most recently as research director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. This project will draw upon The CUNY Graduate Center's strengths in studying immigration, community organization, urban politics, comparative politics, and international relations; and it will build on these strengths by forming, within the three research institutes, an intellectual nucleus of scholars working on these matters.