Research Projects & Selected Publications
Racial Politics in New Immigrant Destinations
Abstract: Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal sovereignty and forcibly removed Native children from their tribes. ICWA’s protections extend to children based on tribal citizenship, not racial status. Marshalling 40 years of archival data from the government agencies charged with ICWA enforcement, I analyze how ICWA implementers determine a child’s Indian status. I find that authorities routinely eschew the requirement to treat Indian as a citizenship category, re-defining it as a race. Yet whether and how state actors racialize Indianness varies by the institutional contexts in which they work. Comparing state child welfare agencies, state courts, and federal courts, I identify three institutional characteristics that organize race-making practices: evidentiary standards, record-keeping requirements, and incentive structures. These characteristics influence whether state decision-makers operationalize “Indian” as a racial category and the cognitive and ideological processes that undergird their classifications. I also demonstrate that changes in these institutional characteristics yield concomitant shifts in whether and how state agents engage in racialization.
Abstract: This article problematizes a particular category in immigration politics: refugee. Drawing on a content analysis of 356 television news segments that aired on five major news networks between 1980 and 2016, we examine how the category “refugee” has been used in public discourse, to whom it has been applied, and the factors that shape characterizations of those who receive the label. While existing research finds that the media disproportionately associate the term “immigrant” with economic, criminal, and national security threats, we find that U.S. television news coverage associates the term “refugee” with sympathy. We find that these sympathetic portrayals are contingent upon and most common in stories about migrants in distant locales. When the news media cover individuals likely to settle or who are already settled in the United States, coverage takes a more negative tone. We also find evidence that U.S. border politics and foreign political interests affect which migrants receive the refugee label and how they are portrayed. We conclude with implications for the sociological study of classification and for immigration politics more generally.
*Winner, American Sociological Association Body and Embodiment Best Article Award
"Logics of Redistribution: Determinants of Generosity in Three U.S. Social Welfare Programs," Sociological Perspectives (with Rachel Kahn Best) - Published Article
"TANF Child-Only Cases in California: Barriers to Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being," Journal of Children and Poverty (with Richard Speiglman, Johannes M. Bos, Yongmei Li, and Lorena Ortiz) - Published Article
"Welfare Reform's Ineligible Immigrant Parents: Program Reach and Enrollment Barriers," Journal of Children and Poverty (with Richard Speiglman, Rosa-Maria Castaneda, and Randy Capps) - Published Article
"Voting Intersections: Race, Class, and Participation in Presidential Elections in the United States 2008–2016," Sociological Perspectives (with Daniel Laurison and Ankit Rastoggi) - Published Article Abstract: Intersectional analyses are increasingly common in sociology; however, analyses of voting tend to focus on only race, class, or gender, using the others as control variables. We assess whether and how race, class, and gender intersect to produce distinct patterns of voter engagement in presidential elections 2008–2016. Per existing research, we find income strongly predicts White voting. However, the class gap in voting is not statistically significant among Black voters. In contrast to common characterizations of Black people as politically disengaged, lower income Black citizens are more likely to vote than their White counterparts. Moreover, the lowest earning Black women vote at dramatically higher rates than any other race-gender combination in this income group. These findings call into question the perceived universality of the income gap in voting and widespread claims that more resources directly facilitate voting. They also have implications for our understanding of political participation, social inequality, and democratic citizenship.
Abstract: Existing research demonstrates that black population size in a given area correlates with the passage of racially restrictive policies in that area. This paper examines the mechanisms through which minority population size translates into exclusionary policies. It does so by examining a little-known but critical aspect of US civil rights history: the development of policies which allowed white communities to close their public schools entirely rather than desegregate. Using comparative-historical methods to build on existing quantitative studies, this analysis demonstrates that, while black population size does correlate with the passage of restrictive policies, the adoption of school closing policies was primarily a political strategy used to counter rising black political mobilization. That is, whites were not responding to a demographic threat per se or to increasing contact with blacks, as extant work might suggest. Rather, restrictive policies were a response to increasing political activity and mobilization within black communities.
Abstract: Existing research argues that repression hindered the ability of local civil rights movements to influence the development of local War on Poverty programs; however, the Virginia civil rights struggle defies this pattern. This comparative county-level study melds institutionalist accounts of welfare state development with an analysis of movement repression in order to explain this paradox. A distinction is made between situational and institutional repression. While scholars focus on the former and its negative impact on mobilization, this study suggests that institutional repression can have the opposite effect, unifying movements and facilitating their influence on the formation and implementation of poverty policy. | Contact Information: Hana Brown Associate Professor Department of Sociology Wake Forest University Email: brownhe[at]wfu.edu Office: 04D Kirby Hall (336) 758-3540 Mailing Address: Department of Sociology 1834 Wake Forest Rd. PO Box 7808 Winston-Salem, NC 27109 |