P Levitt
Biographic Data
| ID | 27588 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Levitt |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Levitt |
| SIGNATURE | LEVITT P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wellesley College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6427-0101 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3349 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
Epistemic Decentering
To date, most post- and decolonial responses to inequality in cultural and intellectual institutions have focused on regaining control over “theory” and epistemology. Alexander’s reflection urges us to expand the boundaries of the battleground. Diversifying content is important. But that will not do the trick if it is not accompanied by a range of other shifts in how we engage with these materials and with one another—in the institutions where we…
Migrating arts with (out) migrating artists
Most models of cultural globalization describe circulation to and around conventional cultural centers. The art world becomes more inclusive, but its fundamental hierarchies remain in place. In this paper, we describe another form of cultural globalization called “decentering”, which involves the circulation and increased interconnectedness between peripheries, either with or without their integration to cultural centers. Using a mixed methods ap…
Whence the 3 Percent
This article examines the production and prominence of literature translated into English, asking how far we have come toward decentering America’s literary offerings. Through analyses of the Publishers Weekly Translation Database, we find that global linguistic representation in American publishing remains low and skewed heavily toward the colonial languages of traditional cultural centers, with translations from French, Spanish, and German maki…
Cultures of Cultural Globalization
While prior research foregrounds the economic and political conditions that shape cultural globalization, we focus on the effects of culture. We argue that diffusion itself is a cultural practice, and that two types of cultural schemas - ways of conceptualizing national belonging, on the one hand, and geopolitical ideologies, on the other - shape the people, policies, and infrastructures actors deploy to insert their cultural products into the gl…
Decolonizing Decoloniality
We hear calls to globalize, internationalize, decolonize, and diversify higher education from all corners of the world. What changes do they actually seek? Who is behind them and whose interests do they serve? How much are curricula actually changing? In this article, we explore these questions from outside Europe and the United States by examining art history and comparative literature syllabi from Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea. We find th…
Transnational Social Protection
How do individuals protect and provide for themselves in a world where so many people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship? The conventional wisdom is that access to social protections is limited by proximity—by citizenship, by geographic proximity, and by social networks—which all place natural limits on the availability of social protection. The authors believe this conventional wisdom is sorely out of date. How …
Decentering Migration Studies
Fundamentally changing how we do research and teach, whether it be about migration or about the social sciences in general, will not happen without changing how knowledge is produced and circulates. The inequality pipeline places barriers to entry for researchers, thinkers, and experiences lived outside traditional centers of power at every step of the way. So does the competition, selfishness, and one‐upsmanship that characterizes so much of aca…
Hybrid transnational social protection
More and more people live, study, work, and retire in countries where they are not full citizens. How do they protect and provide for themselves and their families when they live for extended periods outside the places where they have citizenship rights? In this talk, I offer a framework for understanding hybrid transnational social protection developed in a forthcoming book with my colleagues Erica Dobbs, Ken Sun, and Ruxandra Paul. We argue tha…
Cuán “global” es la formación en literatura? El caso de Argentina
Desde formas y latitudes distintas, existen llamamientos a la globalización de la educación superior. Pero, ¿qué es lo que realmente se pide? Este artículo examina los programas de enseñanza de teoría y crítica literaria de Argentina, un país históricamente atravesado por el pensamiento europeo, con una sólida producción académica. Encontramos que los programas priorizan la producción nacional y una selección de obras internacionales, con inclina…
Producing Korean literature (KLit) for export
How does art from what have been culturally peripheral countries that were not former colonies of Western powers scale shift or find its way to the global center? What can the Korean case tell us about the circulation of contemporary literature in a “small language?” The scholarly literature offers many answers to these questions: the role of intermediaries, the power dynamics within the world system of translation, the topographies of literary c…
Getting from Buenos Aires to Mexico City Without Passing Through Madrid
Why do some literary works gain recognition only where they are written while others travel around the globe? We answer these questions through a case study of Argentina where we identify two main pathways to international recognition. The first involves a powerful, well-established route that passes through Spain to get to other parts of Latin America. A second path scales up by de-centring Spain as the capital of Spanish-language publishing and…
An Open Invitation—Depicting Immigration
In 2018, the film “Crazy Rich Asians” became an instant global hit. The first major Hollywood movie that featured an all Asian and Asian-American cast in 25 years grossed $237 million worldwide and became the highest-earning romantic comedy in a decade (Abad-Santos 2018). Supporters heralded the film as a turning point for Asian American representation in film. Others criticized it for playing into stereotypes of materialism and “Tiger Moms.” Sti…
Art doesn’t just reflect the world—it engages with it’
“The contributions in this series explore the migration experience using different kinds of “data.” Our contributors use works of art, novels, songs, and movies to explore many of the same questions they generally ask in their social scientific research. What additional insights come from using arts and culture to think through the issues that concern us? What can images and notes reveal that scholarly work cannot? We also invite original stories…
Managing cultural diversity and (re)defining the national in 'global South' cities
This themed section explores the formation, representation and management of cultural diversity in cities of the ‘global South’ and how these processes are implicated in redefinitions of the nation and national identity. By exploring the linkages between cultural diversity, the city and the nation, the contributions provide important insights into the major challenges facing non-western cities, including those with explicit ‘global city’ aspirati…
Who’s on the Syllabus
This article examines changes in the teaching of modern and contemporary literature in the United States. As university students become more socioeconomically and ethnically diverse, and as universities claim to be offering a more global curriculum, what are students really learning? What kinds of non-Western modern and contemporary writers find their way into the classroom? To answer these questions, we examine how much The Norton Anthology of W…
Scale Shifting
This special issue on scale shifting brings into sharper focus the complexity of global literary circulation, especially when viewed from the perspective of global literary peripheries. In this introduction, we present the idea of scale shifting, a concept we use to move beyond translation to include circulation in global languages, such as English and French. We build on earlier analyses that mapped previous literary worlds and shed light on the…
Becoming a ‘Cultural Destination of Choice’
This article builds upon the concept of vernacularization as a way to better understand the circulation and implementation of global policy assemblages. The added value of a vernacularization approach is that it combines under one analytical umbrella the separate but interdependent factors which affect policy travel and use including: (a) positionality or the social and spatial status of actors, institutions and localities, (b) processes of commu…
Cultural policies in cities of the ‘global South’
Building on the literature on global cities and on the worlding of cities, the articles in this special issue chart how cities outside Europe and North America try to reinvent and rescale themselves using culture. They suggest that the fabric of urban cultural policy is embedded in multi-scalar power dynamics. First, the contributions in this special issue reveal the importance of circulating standards across borders in structuring narratives abo…
The Imagined Globe
Explaining variations in scale shifting
Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging
Global religious institutions shape the transnational migration experience while migrants chip away at and recreate global religions by making them local and starting the process anew. Migrants’ religious institutions are also sites where globally diffused models of social organization and individuals’ local responses converge to produce new mixes of religious beliefs and practices. Transnational institutional connections transformed immigrant co…
Social welfare grey zones
In an era where even citizenship is not a guarantee of access to the welfare state, can non-citizens gain access to social protection? Using health care as a lens, and the United States and Spain as cases, we find that non-citizens do have access to social protection via what we call ‘grey zones’, namely points of disagreement between national and local governments that create opportunities for non-citizens. Grey zones are possible due to process…
Una mirada transnacional
En los 10 años que tiene de haberse fundado esta revista[ 2 ]., importantes cambios demográficos han dado lugar a transformaciones en los estudios sobre migración. Desde esta perspectiva, las preguntas que se hacen los estudiosos de la migración junto con las herramientas de análisis y la metodología que utilizan para responderlas se han modificado drásticamente. En este ensayo se asume una mirada desde una perspectiva idiosincrásica para anlizar…
Deconstructing and Reconstructing. Embracing Alternative Ways of Producing, Classifying and Disseminating Knowledge
In this short piece, we argue for a fundamental reconsideration and reorganization of knowledge production. Intellectual and cultural inequality are part and parcel of socioeconomic inequality. How can we create a better world if we are not clear about the premises behind the knowledge that we have about that world and how it is produced? We need to look carefully at what is silenced and what is said out loud; at what is obscured, hiding in plain…
God Needs No Passport
Conceptualizing Simultaneity
This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely ob…
The Transnational Villagers
In "The Transnational Villagers: Transnational Migration and the Reshaping of Everyday Life," Peggy Levitt explores the lives of Mirafloreños, migrants from a small town in the Dominican Republic who have created a vibrant transnational community linking their hometown with Boston, Massachusetts. Levitt challenges the traditional dichotomy between "here" and "there" by demonstrating how these migrants maintain deep social, economic, and political…
Transnational Migration Studies
The past two decades have witnessed a sea change in migration scholarship. Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong. Transnational migra…
Vernacularization on the ground
The articles published in this special journal issue examine how global ideas about women's rights actually get used in four contexts - China, India, Peru and the United States. Our findings result from collaborative research conducted by teams in each country. We call the process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and strategies vernacularization. In each country, vernacularization differed depending on the contents …
Social Remittances
Social Remittances
Many studies highlight the macro-level dissemination of global culture and institutions. This article focuses on social remittances – a local-level, migration-driven form of cultural diffusion. Social remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities. The role that these resources play in promoting immigrant entrepreneurship, community and family formation, and political …
Transnational migration and the redefinition of the state
In this article, we examine the shifting policies of sending country states towards communities living abroad, demonstrate the ways in which these are redefining the relationship between the state and its territorial boundaries, and highlight how these reconfigure conventional understandings of sovereignty, citizenship and membership. We begin by delineating the different types of policies that sending states are adapting in order to break down …
You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant
The purpose of this article is to summarize what we know about the role that religion plays in transnational migration and to outline a strategy for further research in this area. While migration scholars now generally acknowledge the salience of migrants' economic, social, and political transnational activities, we have largely overlooked the ways in which religious identities and practices also enable migrants to sustain memberships in multiple…
Transnational migration
Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation…
International Perspectives on Transnational Migration
This special issue of the International Migration Review on transnational migration represents both a victory and a challenge. For those who have advocated for the recognition of transnational migration, this publication is a victory in that it attests to the importance and growing acceptance of a transnational perspective among migration scholars. It is also a challenge because many of the criticisms raised initially by detractors have been quit…
Religion as a path to civic engagement
Dreams of global citizenship have long captured the Western imagination, but religion is rarely seen as a possible contributor to its emergence. This paper1 1. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and Changing the American Religious Landscape (Levitt 2007 Levitt , P. 2007 God Needs No Passport: How Immigrants are Changing the American Religious Landscape , New York : The New Press . [Google Scholar]). uses the case of transnational migrants - potent…
Law From Below
Despite the ambivalent history of the domestic application of human rights in the United States, human rights increasingly offer important resources for American grassroots activists. Within the constraints of U.S. policy toward human rights, they provide social movements a kind of global law "from below": a form of cosmopolitan law that subalterns can use to challenge their subordinate position. Using a case study from New York City, we argue th…
Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging
Religious life has long been global. Contemporary migrants extend these ties by transnationalizing everyday religious life. While much has been written about transnational economic and political practices, transnational religious life is not well understood. This paper examines the institutional characteristics of transnational religiosity and has three broad goals. First, it reviews this emerging body of literature and proposes an approach to th…
Strangers No More
De-Centering and Re-Centering
Four conceptual and methodological edges or areas of study are outlined. They are located near what have been the boundaries between the sociology of religion and other subfields, where we believe a potential exists to encourage a wide range of scholars to revisit some central concepts. Paying attention to these edges—as a means to de-center to re-center our debates in new ways—not only broadens and deepens our knowledge of the “religious,” it en…
Transnational Politics as Cultural Circulation
This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on transnational politics by bringing tools used by scholars of cultural diffusion and circulation into these debates. We build on research on social remittances and their potential to yield broader and deeper effects or to ‘scale up’ and ‘scale out.’ Based on a variety of empirical examples, we propose that processes such as circulation, portability, and contact, viewed through a transnationa…
Local-Level Global Religion
Recent work calls attention to religious globalization - the proliferation of transnational religious structures and movements that challenge the nation state. But contemporary migration prompts a different type of religious transnationalism that has not been sufficiently explored. Sustained connections between communities of origin and destination give rise to a set of transnationalized institutional relationships, discourses, and practices that…
Social remittances and the changing transnational political landscape
The term “social remittances” was coined over fifteen years ago to capture the notion that, in addition to money, migration also entails the circulation of ideas, practices, skills, identities, and social capital also circulate between sending and receiving communities. The articles in this special issue, which are primarily about migration and politics, drive forward research on social remittances by examining understudied areas such as Poland, …
What's wrong with migration scholarship? A critique and a way forward
Several problems plague migration scholarship. Much work continues to use specific national (and sometimes regional) frames to analyse migration in other contexts or to find general properties based on particular national experiences. It assumes that boundedness, rootedness and membership in a single national, ethnic or religious group are the natural order of things. And it doesn't take culture seriously enough, whether it be the different cultu…
Flip-flop
Caroline Knowles' provocative, engaging new book about globalization challenges conventional wisdom. It brings us down from the 'commanding heights of globalization', to 'less hegemonic, less sensa
New Perspectives on Immigrant Contexts of Reception
We argue that important, overlooked differences in what we call the 'cultural armature' of Portland, Maine, and Danbury, Connecticut help explain the variation in how each city received new immigrants in recent years. Portland has a long history of contact with the outside world and used its cosmopolitan character to promote urban redevelopment and welcome immigrants from a range of countries of origin. Danbury's small-town, insular outlook, and …
Building bridges
Rethinking "transnational migration and the re-definition of the state" or what to do about (semi-) permanent impermanence
We are delighted that our article has been chosen for this special anniversary issue. We thank Alice Bloch for her careful reading and insightful response to our ideas. We wrote this article more t
Mobility and health sector development in China and India
China and India are both attempting to create comprehensive healthcare systems in the context of rapid but uneven economic growth and rapidly changing burdens of disease. While in each country the referencing of international policies and work experience abroad have been part of this process, research has yet to examine the kind of knowledge that is exchanged or the various actors involved in knowledge circulation. Based on a study of two sub-nat…
Beyond Home and Return
To understand the social fields with which the children of immigrants actually identify, we interrogate the multiple sites and sources which Gujarati-origin Indian American Hindus and Muslims draw upon to construct their religious identities. We find that our respondents create religious selves by combining their imaginings of their parents’ religious upbringing with their own real and imagined experiences of religious life in the US, India, and …
American Dreaming
Social Remittances
Many studies highlight the macro-level dissemination of global culture and institutions. This article focuses on social remittances – a local-level, migration-driven form of cultural diffusion. Social remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities. The role that these resources play in promoting immigrant entrepreneurship, community and family formation, and political …
Local-Level Global Religion
Recent work calls attention to religious globalization - the proliferation of transnational religious structures and movements that challenge the nation state. But contemporary migration prompts a different type of religious transnationalism that has not been sufficiently explored. Sustained connections between communities of origin and destination give rise to a set of transnationalized institutional relationships, discourses, and practices that…
Social Remittances
Transnational migration
Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation…
The Transnational Villagers
The Transnational Villagers
In "The Transnational Villagers: Transnational Migration and the Reshaping of Everyday Life," Peggy Levitt explores the lives of Mirafloreños, migrants from a small town in the Dominican Republic who have created a vibrant transnational community linking their hometown with Boston, Massachusetts. Levitt challenges the traditional dichotomy between "here" and "there" by demonstrating how these migrants maintain deep social, economic, and political…
Seeking Community in a Global City
Book Review| July 01 2002 Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles, Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla. Peggy Levitt Peggy Levitt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2002) 21 (4): 168–169. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501232 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twit…
International Perspectives on Transnational Migration
This special issue of the International Migration Review on transnational migration represents both a victory and a challenge. For those who have advocated for the recognition of transnational migration, this publication is a victory in that it attests to the importance and growing acceptance of a transnational perspective among migration scholars. It is also a challenge because many of the criticisms raised initially by detractors have been quit…
Transnational migration and the redefinition of the state
In this article, we examine the shifting policies of sending country states towards communities living abroad, demonstrate the ways in which these are redefining the relationship between the state and its territorial boundaries, and highlight how these reconfigure conventional understandings of sovereignty, citizenship and membership. We begin by delineating the different types of policies that sending states are adapting in order to break down …
You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant
The purpose of this article is to summarize what we know about the role that religion plays in transnational migration and to outline a strategy for further research in this area. While migration scholars now generally acknowledge the salience of migrants' economic, social, and political transnational activities, we have largely overlooked the ways in which religious identities and practices also enable migrants to sustain memberships in multiple…
Perspectivas internacionales sobre migración
migracin y distinguimos entre las formas de ser y las formas de pertenecer a ese campo. Argumentamos que la asimilacin y los vnculos transnacionales duraderos no son incompatibles ni trminos de una oposicin binomial. Resaltamos los procesos que estn soterrados a la investigacin tradicional sobre la migracin, pero que se abren al escrutinio analtico bajo una ptica transnacional. Situamos nuestra perspectiva sobre el fenmeno migratorio dentro de un…
Conceptualizing Simultaneity
This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely ob…
Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging
Religious life has long been global. Contemporary migrants extend these ties by transnationalizing everyday religious life. While much has been written about transnational economic and political practices, transnational religious life is not well understood. This paper examines the institutional characteristics of transnational religiosity and has three broad goals. First, it reviews this emerging body of literature and proposes an approach to th…
Building bridges
Transnational Migration Studies
The past two decades have witnessed a sea change in migration scholarship. Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong. Transnational migra…
Mexican New York
Religion as a path to civic engagement
Dreams of global citizenship have long captured the Western imagination, but religion is rarely seen as a possible contributor to its emergence. This paper1 1. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and Changing the American Religious Landscape (Levitt 2007 Levitt , P. 2007 God Needs No Passport: How Immigrants are Changing the American Religious Landscape , New York : The New Press . [Google Scholar]). uses the case of transnational migrants - potent…
Vernacularization on the ground
The articles published in this special journal issue examine how global ideas about women's rights actually get used in four contexts - China, India, Peru and the United States. Our findings result from collaborative research conducted by teams in each country. We call the process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and strategies vernacularization. In each country, vernacularization differed depending on the contents …
Law From Below
Despite the ambivalent history of the domestic application of human rights in the United States, human rights increasingly offer important resources for American grassroots activists. Within the constraints of U.S. policy toward human rights, they provide social movements a kind of global law "from below": a form of cosmopolitan law that subalterns can use to challenge their subordinate position. Using a case study from New York City, we argue th…
Taking Culture Seriously
Most discussions about the relationship between migration, incorporation, and development suffer from two misguided assumptions. First, they focus too much on the economic at the expense of the socio-cultural. It’s as if we just get the money right, all else will follow. Second, they assume that redressing poverty in immigrant communities and alleviating underdevelopment in the communities migrants come from are two separate goals when, in fact, …
Beyond Home and Return
To understand the social fields with which the children of immigrants actually identify, we interrogate the multiple sites and sources which Gujarati-origin Indian American Hindus and Muslims draw upon to construct their religious identities. We find that our respondents create religious selves by combining their imaginings of their parents’ religious upbringing with their own real and imagined experiences of religious life in the US, India, and …
De-Centering and Re-Centering
Four conceptual and methodological edges or areas of study are outlined. They are located near what have been the boundaries between the sociology of religion and other subfields, where we believe a potential exists to encourage a wide range of scholars to revisit some central concepts. Paying attention to these edges—as a means to de-center to re-center our debates in new ways—not only broadens and deepens our knowledge of the “religious,” it en…
New Perspectives on Immigrant Contexts of Reception
We argue that important, overlooked differences in what we call the 'cultural armature' of Portland, Maine, and Danbury, Connecticut help explain the variation in how each city received new immigrants in recent years. Portland has a long history of contact with the outside world and used its cosmopolitan character to promote urban redevelopment and welcome immigrants from a range of countries of origin. Danbury's small-town, insular outlook, and …
What's wrong with migration scholarship? A critique and a way forward
Several problems plague migration scholarship. Much work continues to use specific national (and sometimes regional) frames to analyse migration in other contexts or to find general properties based on particular national experiences. It assumes that boundedness, rootedness and membership in a single national, ethnic or religious group are the natural order of things. And it doesn't take culture seriously enough, whether it be the different cultu…
Sociology (64 works) · Political science (59 works) · Law (44 works) · Politics (31 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (24 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (23 works) · Law (23 works) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (22 works) · Economics (18 works) · Geography (15 works)