John Doering-White
Biographic Data
| ID | 115847 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Doering-White |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Doering-White |
| SIGNATURE | DOERING-WHITE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Carolina |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8484-1082 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Little pains” and endurance: Health narratives and practices among migrants in transit through Mexico
How do migrants in transit through Mexico interpret and manage the injuries and diseases they experience on their route? We argue that migrants in transit attempt to minimise their ill-health while at the same time engaging in health practices to keep moving to arrive at their destination. Through ethnographic research in migrant shelters in Mexico, we examine the reasons migrants give to minimise their injuries: 1) they believe pain is contingen…
Humanitarian aid and the everyday invisibility of climate-related migration from Central America
This article examines how everyday practices of humanitarian documentation shape the visibility of climate-related migration from Central America. Based on participant observation and interviews with migrants at a humanitarian aid shelter in Mexico, we argue that existing documentation practices may contribute to the everyday erasure of climate-related migration. We observed that migrants rarely mentioned climate change during routine shelter int…
The violence of uncertainty: Theorizing everyday immigrant necropolitics across three cases
This article theorizes everyday forms of uncertainty that immigrant and refugee populations negotiate as a form of violence. We argue that while the state has made immigrants and refugees an explicit target on which to exercise sovereignty through detention and deportation, sovereignty also operates through a necropolitics of uncertainty where immigrants and refugees face inconsistent and spatially diffuse states of exception that target their ma…
Making 'Best interest' visible: The Role of Frontline Staff in the Care of Unaccompanied Children
Most unaccompanied children (UC) in the United States are temporarily held in government custody until a long-term placement is found for them. They often reside in shelters or temporary foster care setting which are mandated to uphold the ‘best interest’ standards outlined in the Flores Settlement Agreement, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, and state child welfare laws. Based on analyses of in-depth interviews with 65 faci…
Aid Worker’s Perceptions of Psychological First Aid amid Border Externalization in Mexico
Uses of the Trauma of Others: Insights from Two Ethnographic Studies of Human Service Workers
“Compassion fatigue” and “secondary traumatic stress” are clinical constructs developed to name the distress human services workers can experience when exposed to the trauma of the people they serve. We examine how human services workers mobilize the legitimacy and expansiveness of these constructs to respond to workplace demands. These clinically validated, yet persistently contested, constructs—in addition to being phenomena that happen to work…
(Dis)embedding humanitarianism: Trajectories of subordination and subversion within migrant-serving NGOs
Care under pressure: Policy contradictions of speedy release, safety, and placement suitability in ORR-contracted programs for unaccompanied migrant children
Climate-health risk (In)visibility in the context of everyday humanitarian practice
The Shelter Multiple: How Humanitarianisms Hang Together at a Mexican Non-governmental Migrant Shelter
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork at a nongovernmental migrant shelter in Mexico to examine how aid workers coordinate apparently contradictory humanitarian orientations. Prior research has called attention to the institutionalization of grassroots humanitarian organizations as they take on the work of categorizing migrants as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. Studies also call attention to initiatives that oppose such in…
Towards a social determination of health framework for understanding climate disruption and health-disease processes
We compare the social determinants of health (SDOH) and the social determination of health (SDET) from the school of Latin American Social Medicine/Collective Health. Whereas SDET acknowledges how capitalist rule continues to shape global structures and public health concerns, SDOH proffers neoliberal solutions that obscure much of the violence and dispossession that influence contemporary migration and health-disease experiences. Working in simu…
Which Clinic? Pre-Covid or Post-Covid?”: Immigration Policy Uncertainty, Immigrant Serving Organization, and the Response to Covid-19
Brokering Resources during a Pandemic: Exploring How Organizations and Clinics Responded to the Needs of Immigrant Communities during Covid-19
Though COVID-19 has had sweeping implications, many immigrant groups in the United States have been disproportionately affected. The purpose of the present study is to explore the impact of COVID-19 on immigrant communities and how local immigrant-serving organizations (ISOs) have responded during the pandemic. The authors conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with executive directors and program coordinators of 31 ISOs and health clinics in …
Shelter Vision: Compassion, Fear, and Learning to (Not) See Trauma along the Migrant Trail through Mexico
Within a context of shifting affective economies of racialised fear and reluctant humanitarianism that surround Central American migration through Mexico, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to describe how aid workers negotiated concerns expressed by visiting volunteers about compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatisation. Building on the work of scholars who examine in…
Participatory photography and undocumented migration through Mexico at the intersection of social work and anthropology
This article reflects on participatory photography in the context of ethnographic fieldwork at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to consider broader intersections between social work and anthropology. I describe how shifting immigration enforcement trends across Mexico reconfigured my original plan for integrating participatory photography into my work as a researcher and shelter worker. Tracing these changes through three cases ex…
Entrepreneurship as a community practice strategy: Lessons from Detroit
This article examines entrepreneurship as a community practice strategy, drawing on interviews with 35 participants in a small business training program and six program staff members. Interviewees characterized entrepreneurship as an escape from the constraints of wage labor and as a way to participate actively in Detroit’s much publicized, yet inequitable revitalization. They also described entrepreneurship as risky and unnerving , especially in…
Qué mamada! (What a Joke): Humor, Hostility, and Hospitality along the Central American Migrant Trail
Along the Central American migrant trail through Mexico, jokes and teasing offer a window into a transnational border regime defined by both migrant hospitality and xenophobic hostility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a welding workshop in Monterrey, a city in Northern Mexico where Central Americans are increasingly waylaid on journeys to the US-Mexico border, this article examines playfully derisive and sexually charged jokes, enacted materi…
Situated Causality: What Ethnography Can Contribute to Causal Inquiry in Social Work
This article considers how ethnography can contribute to developing causal theories relevant to social work practice. Social work researchers typically reserve causal inferences for studies that rely on certain quantitative study designs, and ethnography tends to be seen as insufficient for making causal claims. Integrating data from three ethnographies of social work practice, this article posits that ethnography is particularly well equipped to…
This is Home: A Refugee Story, directed by Alexandra Shiva
The shifting boundaries of “best interest”: Sheltering unaccompanied Central American minors in transit through Mexico
Evidencing Violence and Care along the Central American Migrant Trail through Mexico
This ethnographic study explores how migrant shelters that assist people migrating without authorization through Mexico mediate seemingly contradictory frameworks: human smuggling and humanitarianism. Amid intensified immigration enforcement and policing along migration routes, Central Americans crossing Mexico without authorization increasingly interact with smugglers. These interactions are often characterized as much by mutuality as they are b…
Raising Children Amid the Threat of Deportation: Perspectives from Undocumented Latina Mothers
Despite the large number of families with at least one undocumented parent, little research has investigated mothering amid the threat of immigration enforcement. We present results of a community-based participatory study with 7 Latina mothers who describe their experiences of parenting while navigating the possibility of deportation. Undocumented mothers found meaning in caring for their children. Yet due to restrictions related to immigration …
Testimonial Engagement: Undocumented Latina Mothers Navigating a Gendered Deportation Regime
Evidencing Violence and Care along the Central American Migrant Trail through Mexico
This ethnographic study explores how migrant shelters that assist people migrating without authorization through Mexico mediate seemingly contradictory frameworks: human smuggling and humanitarianism. Amid intensified immigration enforcement and policing along migration routes, Central Americans crossing Mexico without authorization increasingly interact with smugglers. These interactions are often characterized as much by mutuality as they are b…
The shifting boundaries of “best interest”: Sheltering unaccompanied Central American minors in transit through Mexico
Raising Children Amid the Threat of Deportation: Perspectives from Undocumented Latina Mothers
Despite the large number of families with at least one undocumented parent, little research has investigated mothering amid the threat of immigration enforcement. We present results of a community-based participatory study with 7 Latina mothers who describe their experiences of parenting while navigating the possibility of deportation. Undocumented mothers found meaning in caring for their children. Yet due to restrictions related to immigration …
Testimonial Engagement: Undocumented Latina Mothers Navigating a Gendered Deportation Regime
The Shelter Multiple: How Humanitarianisms Hang Together at a Mexican Non-governmental Migrant Shelter
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork at a nongovernmental migrant shelter in Mexico to examine how aid workers coordinate apparently contradictory humanitarian orientations. Prior research has called attention to the institutionalization of grassroots humanitarian organizations as they take on the work of categorizing migrants as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. Studies also call attention to initiatives that oppose such in…
Shelter Vision: Compassion, Fear, and Learning to (Not) See Trauma along the Migrant Trail through Mexico
Within a context of shifting affective economies of racialised fear and reluctant humanitarianism that surround Central American migration through Mexico, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to describe how aid workers negotiated concerns expressed by visiting volunteers about compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatisation. Building on the work of scholars who examine in…
Qué mamada! (What a Joke): Humor, Hostility, and Hospitality along the Central American Migrant Trail
Along the Central American migrant trail through Mexico, jokes and teasing offer a window into a transnational border regime defined by both migrant hospitality and xenophobic hostility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a welding workshop in Monterrey, a city in Northern Mexico where Central Americans are increasingly waylaid on journeys to the US-Mexico border, this article examines playfully derisive and sexually charged jokes, enacted materi…
(Dis)embedding humanitarianism: Trajectories of subordination and subversion within migrant-serving NGOs
The violence of uncertainty: Theorizing everyday immigrant necropolitics across three cases
This article theorizes everyday forms of uncertainty that immigrant and refugee populations negotiate as a form of violence. We argue that while the state has made immigrants and refugees an explicit target on which to exercise sovereignty through detention and deportation, sovereignty also operates through a necropolitics of uncertainty where immigrants and refugees face inconsistent and spatially diffuse states of exception that target their ma…
Towards a social determination of health framework for understanding climate disruption and health-disease processes
We compare the social determinants of health (SDOH) and the social determination of health (SDET) from the school of Latin American Social Medicine/Collective Health. Whereas SDET acknowledges how capitalist rule continues to shape global structures and public health concerns, SDOH proffers neoliberal solutions that obscure much of the violence and dispossession that influence contemporary migration and health-disease experiences. Working in simu…
Brokering Resources during a Pandemic: Exploring How Organizations and Clinics Responded to the Needs of Immigrant Communities during Covid-19
Though COVID-19 has had sweeping implications, many immigrant groups in the United States have been disproportionately affected. The purpose of the present study is to explore the impact of COVID-19 on immigrant communities and how local immigrant-serving organizations (ISOs) have responded during the pandemic. The authors conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with executive directors and program coordinators of 31 ISOs and health clinics in …
This is Home: A Refugee Story, directed by Alexandra Shiva
Testimonial Engagement: Undocumented Latina Mothers Navigating a Gendered Deportation Regime
The shifting boundaries of “best interest”: Sheltering unaccompanied Central American minors in transit through Mexico
Evidencing Violence and Care along the Central American Migrant Trail through Mexico
This ethnographic study explores how migrant shelters that assist people migrating without authorization through Mexico mediate seemingly contradictory frameworks: human smuggling and humanitarianism. Amid intensified immigration enforcement and policing along migration routes, Central Americans crossing Mexico without authorization increasingly interact with smugglers. These interactions are often characterized as much by mutuality as they are b…
Raising Children Amid the Threat of Deportation: Perspectives from Undocumented Latina Mothers
Despite the large number of families with at least one undocumented parent, little research has investigated mothering amid the threat of immigration enforcement. We present results of a community-based participatory study with 7 Latina mothers who describe their experiences of parenting while navigating the possibility of deportation. Undocumented mothers found meaning in caring for their children. Yet due to restrictions related to immigration …
Situated Causality: What Ethnography Can Contribute to Causal Inquiry in Social Work
This article considers how ethnography can contribute to developing causal theories relevant to social work practice. Social work researchers typically reserve causal inferences for studies that rely on certain quantitative study designs, and ethnography tends to be seen as insufficient for making causal claims. Integrating data from three ethnographies of social work practice, this article posits that ethnography is particularly well equipped to…
This is Home: A Refugee Story, directed by Alexandra Shiva
Participatory photography and undocumented migration through Mexico at the intersection of social work and anthropology
This article reflects on participatory photography in the context of ethnographic fieldwork at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to consider broader intersections between social work and anthropology. I describe how shifting immigration enforcement trends across Mexico reconfigured my original plan for integrating participatory photography into my work as a researcher and shelter worker. Tracing these changes through three cases ex…
Entrepreneurship as a community practice strategy: Lessons from Detroit
This article examines entrepreneurship as a community practice strategy, drawing on interviews with 35 participants in a small business training program and six program staff members. Interviewees characterized entrepreneurship as an escape from the constraints of wage labor and as a way to participate actively in Detroit’s much publicized, yet inequitable revitalization. They also described entrepreneurship as risky and unnerving , especially in…
Qué mamada! (What a Joke): Humor, Hostility, and Hospitality along the Central American Migrant Trail
Along the Central American migrant trail through Mexico, jokes and teasing offer a window into a transnational border regime defined by both migrant hospitality and xenophobic hostility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a welding workshop in Monterrey, a city in Northern Mexico where Central Americans are increasingly waylaid on journeys to the US-Mexico border, this article examines playfully derisive and sexually charged jokes, enacted materi…
Which Clinic? Pre-Covid or Post-Covid?”: Immigration Policy Uncertainty, Immigrant Serving Organization, and the Response to Covid-19
Brokering Resources during a Pandemic: Exploring How Organizations and Clinics Responded to the Needs of Immigrant Communities during Covid-19
Though COVID-19 has had sweeping implications, many immigrant groups in the United States have been disproportionately affected. The purpose of the present study is to explore the impact of COVID-19 on immigrant communities and how local immigrant-serving organizations (ISOs) have responded during the pandemic. The authors conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with executive directors and program coordinators of 31 ISOs and health clinics in …
Shelter Vision: Compassion, Fear, and Learning to (Not) See Trauma along the Migrant Trail through Mexico
Within a context of shifting affective economies of racialised fear and reluctant humanitarianism that surround Central American migration through Mexico, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to describe how aid workers negotiated concerns expressed by visiting volunteers about compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatisation. Building on the work of scholars who examine in…
Aid Worker’s Perceptions of Psychological First Aid amid Border Externalization in Mexico
Uses of the Trauma of Others: Insights from Two Ethnographic Studies of Human Service Workers
“Compassion fatigue” and “secondary traumatic stress” are clinical constructs developed to name the distress human services workers can experience when exposed to the trauma of the people they serve. We examine how human services workers mobilize the legitimacy and expansiveness of these constructs to respond to workplace demands. These clinically validated, yet persistently contested, constructs—in addition to being phenomena that happen to work…
(Dis)embedding humanitarianism: Trajectories of subordination and subversion within migrant-serving NGOs
Care under pressure: Policy contradictions of speedy release, safety, and placement suitability in ORR-contracted programs for unaccompanied migrant children
Climate-health risk (In)visibility in the context of everyday humanitarian practice
The Shelter Multiple: How Humanitarianisms Hang Together at a Mexican Non-governmental Migrant Shelter
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork at a nongovernmental migrant shelter in Mexico to examine how aid workers coordinate apparently contradictory humanitarian orientations. Prior research has called attention to the institutionalization of grassroots humanitarian organizations as they take on the work of categorizing migrants as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. Studies also call attention to initiatives that oppose such in…
Towards a social determination of health framework for understanding climate disruption and health-disease processes
We compare the social determinants of health (SDOH) and the social determination of health (SDET) from the school of Latin American Social Medicine/Collective Health. Whereas SDET acknowledges how capitalist rule continues to shape global structures and public health concerns, SDOH proffers neoliberal solutions that obscure much of the violence and dispossession that influence contemporary migration and health-disease experiences. Working in simu…
Humanitarian aid and the everyday invisibility of climate-related migration from Central America
This article examines how everyday practices of humanitarian documentation shape the visibility of climate-related migration from Central America. Based on participant observation and interviews with migrants at a humanitarian aid shelter in Mexico, we argue that existing documentation practices may contribute to the everyday erasure of climate-related migration. We observed that migrants rarely mentioned climate change during routine shelter int…
The violence of uncertainty: Theorizing everyday immigrant necropolitics across three cases
This article theorizes everyday forms of uncertainty that immigrant and refugee populations negotiate as a form of violence. We argue that while the state has made immigrants and refugees an explicit target on which to exercise sovereignty through detention and deportation, sovereignty also operates through a necropolitics of uncertainty where immigrants and refugees face inconsistent and spatially diffuse states of exception that target their ma…
Making 'Best interest' visible: The Role of Frontline Staff in the Care of Unaccompanied Children
Most unaccompanied children (UC) in the United States are temporarily held in government custody until a long-term placement is found for them. They often reside in shelters or temporary foster care setting which are mandated to uphold the ‘best interest’ standards outlined in the Flores Settlement Agreement, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, and state child welfare laws. Based on analyses of in-depth interviews with 65 faci…
“Little pains” and endurance: Health narratives and practices among migrants in transit through Mexico
How do migrants in transit through Mexico interpret and manage the injuries and diseases they experience on their route? We argue that migrants in transit attempt to minimise their ill-health while at the same time engaging in health practices to keep moving to arrive at their destination. Through ethnographic research in migrant shelters in Mexico, we examine the reasons migrants give to minimise their injuries: 1) they believe pain is contingen…
Political science (19 works) · Migration, Health and Trauma (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (12 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (10 works) · Ethnography (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Immigration (8 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works)