B Purkayastha
Biographic Data
| ID | 14666 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Purkayastha |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Purkayastha |
| SIGNATURE | PURKAYASTHA B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1386-138X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 381 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Decolonial Journeys: Gender and Society
Relational counterpublics: Media discourses on the Covid Delta variant surge in India
This article analyzes 2135 news reports published in four languages in India and the United States about the COVID Delta variant surge in India in 2021. We theorize how the dominant and alternate or counter media discourses, in varying structural and political contexts, emerged as ‘relational counterpublics’. Influenced by scholarly decolonial conversations critical of methodological nationalism, we examine pandemic media discourses in their glob…
Re-thinking the decolonisation of knowledge and dismantling of intellectual imperialism: Focusing on Epistemic and Social Justice
This introduction discusses the articles in our special issue ‘Decolonising Epistemology’, and derives from them several recommendations for decolonisation: (1) Current decolonisation efforts are mainly led by privileged scholars, when they should be spearheaded by oppressed scholars. Scholars holding privilege should focus on supporting roles. (2) Decolonisation should put dismantling the global power structures erected by colonialism front and …
On migrants, violence and the contours of colonised knowledge
Knowledge hierarchies between the Global North and South have ensured that powerful scholars in the North disseminate theories that claim to explain contemporary social patterns across the world. Many Southern theories have identified and emphasised aspects of power relations that underlie North-based explanations. These correctives, which often indicate the continuing colonial roots of current Northern explanations, are critical for understandin…
Gendered Patterns of Counter-dissemination: Hindu Women Navigating Religious Nationalism in the United States
Religious nationalism exacerbates the vulnerabilities of socially marginalised groups like women and immigrants. Ironically, it also creates several spaces for social and political engagement for marginalised groups, and recruits them in networks of ideological dissemination. Some of these networks transnationally bring together diasporic members, who create global consent for religious nationalist governments in their home countries. But studyin…
Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality
This prescient Handbook examines inequalities in humanitarianism at multiple levels, highlighting the long-lasting impact of colonialism on contemporary power relations. Silke Roth, Bandana Purkayastha and Tobias Denskus bring together esteemed experts from the global north and south who introduce crucial research ethics frameworks and methodologies in order to study humanitarianism and inequality. Adopting an intersectional approach, this Handbo…
Water, Water, Everywhere… but for Whom
Bandana Purkayastha and Rianka Roy on scarcity and supply in a thirsty world
Why Don't South Asians in the U.S. Count As “Asian”: Global and Local Factors Shaping Anti‐South Asian Racism in the United States
In a 2020 U.S. survey, more Asian Indians than Chinese indicated that they were worried about post‐Covid‐19 hate crimes. Yet, post‐Covid violence against people of Asian background has been viewed as being directed against “Chinese‐looking” individuals. This is just one example of how South Asians are overlooked in discourses about Asian Americans. This theoretical paper provides an expansion of the racial formation framework to explain this excl…
We Cannot Go There, They Cannot Come Here: Dispersed Care, Asian Indian Immigrant Families and the Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families and displaced individuals. For migrant workers, these disruptions and displacements exacerbated the state-imposed constraints on family formation. But how did high-skilled and high-wage immigrants, presumably immune from these challenges, provide care to and receive care from families during the pandemic? Based on 33 in-depth interviews with high-skilled Asian Indian immigrants in the USA during the pandem…
Caste, gender, race: Signposts of a feminist anti-caste approach
This commentary responds to the essay by Suraj Yengde titled 'Race and Caste in the Making of US Sociology', picks up a few threads in Yengde's argument and attempts to unravel them in the interests of deepening this conversation on an issue that has returned to the foreground of global sociology and anthropology. Given the thin and tenuous disciplinary separations between sociology and social anthropology in India, especially evident in studies …
Hidden in Plain Sight: “Neutral” Enclosures for High‐Skilled Immigrants During Covid‐19 1
Politicians and mainstream media in the EU, UK, and US regularly emphasize the need for highly skilled migrants, but, over the last few decades, the terms and conditions for these highly skilled migrants have changed drastically. As part of the neoliberal migrant control regime, highly skilled migrants are brought to countries under very restrictive conditions. They work and contribute taxes but have few to no political rights. Based on data on h…
What Can We Learn about Migration and Migrants from Southern Scholars? A Brief Discussion
Within the United States, there is a dominant focus on international migration and international migrants' assimilation and integration efforts, along with separate conversations on intersecting structures that marginalize non‐white migrants and citizens. Trafficking and refugee studies are relatively small and distinct fields that mostly remain outside dominant scholarly conversations on migration, especially in sociology. This essay presents on…
Eroding Inclusions and Expanding Exclusions: Education During Pandemics
The global COVID-related pandemic ushered in high death rates globally, initiated lockdowns of international boundaries and internal borders in countries and regions, and abruptly mandated home-based work for a large swath of professions. This paper focuses on disruptions and dislocations associated with the pandemic to discuss the structures of inequality revealed during this period. I emphasise that the meanings of education, its organisational…
Caregiving and Care Receiving Among Asian Indian Immigrants in the Usa During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This study examines the intersection of wellbeing and care experienced by first-generation Asian Indian high-skilled immigrants in the USA in spaces varying from the home to the neighborhood, city, and state in sending and receiving countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 resulted in new stressors that affected the physical, mental, and emotional health of interviewees, but many found ways to mitigate the effects of the pan…
Knowledge Hierarchies and Feminist Dilemmas: Contexts, Assemblages, Voices, and Silences
Many feminist scholars have challenged West-centric epistemologies and offered concepts such as multiple modernities and decoloniality as appropriate frames for understanding and challenging knowledge hierarchies. Much of these challenges have come from the two-thirds world, though some emanated from scholars located in the one-third world. This chapter presents two related discussions. First, the challenge of moving beyond binaries such as the G…
Living religions across transnational spaces: Experiences of South Asian American Hindu and Muslim women
This paper focuses on women of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin in the US diaspora to examine how religious identities unfold within multi-layered transnational structures that range from political histories and events to active webs of family and community relationships that stretch across the diaspora. Our analysis draws on focus groups and interviews with highly educated Hindu and Muslim women in the US. For these women, approaches to …
Trading Life: Organ Trafficking, Illicit Networks, and Exploitation
Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asians Traverse a Transnational World
In the continuing debates on the topic of racial and ethnic identity in the United States, there are some that argue that ethnicity is an ascribed reality. To the contrary, others claim that individuals are becoming increasingly active in choosing and constructing their ethnic identities.Focusing on second-generation South Asian Americans, Bandana Purkayastha offers fresh insights into the subjective experience of race, ethnicity, and social clas…
As a woman I cannot just leave the house: Gendered spaces and HIV vulnerability in marriages in Kenya
This article analyses how spaces are implicated in extramarital sex and HIV transmission in marriage. Drawing on the experiences and practices of married women and men in Kenya, we demonstrate how intersectionality is expressed through the social organization of space to shape particular patterns of femininity and masculinity and enable, mostly, men’s infidelity and the possibility of the HIV risk. HIV mitigation policies focus mostly on altering…
Migration, migrants, and human security
This introductory article outlines a framework to bridge some of the current fragmentation and knowledge hierarchies in the sociological field of migration. The article builds on the insights - and epistemological roots - used in different parts of the world to reflect on 21st-century realities of migration and human security. It considers international migrants, internally displaced persons, refugees and trafficked persons as part of a continuum…
The transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture
We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of "Indian rape culture" across historical time and social space. We examine news coverage of a highly visible 2012 rape in Delhi in two newspapers, New York Times and Times of India, and the longevity of these articulations through an analysis of online discourses three years later. We further trace colonial-era materializations of Indian rape culture which emerged in the context of the "Indian Mutiny…
I'm a different kind of biracial: How black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race
Increasingly, multiracial families have garnered scholarly attention. However, the roles of ethnicity and immigrant ties are largely absent in bi/multiracial studies. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with black/white biracial Americans with at least one immigrant parent, this study analyzes the dynamic interplay of race, ethnicity, and immigrant roots in the bi/multiracial community. Our findings show that participants struggle to articulate the…
(Re)Telling traditions: The language of social identity among queer South Asians in the United States
Social science scholarship recognises language as a key medium through which we construct our realities and shape our identities. This has led to a stream of research on the intersections of language and social identity. Yet, few studies examine language and queer identities in the diaspora. In an attempt to extend this field of analysis, we focus on queer South Asians in the U.S.. Based on 30 in-depth interviews and content analysis of website a…
De Jure vs. De Facto Rights: A Response to “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology”
Blau's ( ) argument for a Constitutional Project implies that changes in the U.S. Constitution would ensure fundamental adherence to human rights standards. We disagree with the assumption that legal and institutional instruments are guarantors of human rights practice. Instead, we see rights practices as the function of power struggles that include but go far beyond formal law. Instead, we emphasize an important distinction between de jure human…
Sexual Violence, Race and Media (In)Visibility: Intersectional Complexities in a Transnational Frame
Intersectional scholarship argues that women of color have distinct experiences of rape compared to white women and highlights their relative invisibility as victims compared to white women victims in news media. While the bulk of intersectional work has examined such issues within one nation and particularly within the US, in an era of increasingly transnationalized media content, we explore such intersectionalities in a transnational frame. Tha…
Skilled migration and cumulative disadvantage: The case of highly qualified Asian Indian immigrant women in the US
Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asians Traverse a Transnational World
In the continuing debates on the topic of racial and ethnic identity in the United States, there are some that argue that ethnicity is an ascribed reality. To the contrary, others claim that individuals are becoming increasingly active in choosing and constructing their ethnic identities.Focusing on second-generation South Asian Americans, Bandana Purkayastha offers fresh insights into the subjective experience of race, ethnicity, and social clas…
Intersectionality in a Transnational World
Interrogating Intersectionality: Contemporary Globalisation and Racialised Gendering in the Lives of Highly Educated South Asian Americans and their Children
This paper examines the fit of the intersectionality framework for understanding transnational lives. The data for this paper is drawn from my research on South Asian migrants to America and their children, the 1.5 and 2nd generation. I focus on these highly educated migrants and their children and their efforts to maintain meaningful family ties and live religions in a context that spans the USA and selected South Asian countries. I use this dat…
The transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture
We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of "Indian rape culture" across historical time and social space. We examine news coverage of a highly visible 2012 rape in Delhi in two newspapers, New York Times and Times of India, and the longevity of these articulations through an analysis of online discourses three years later. We further trace colonial-era materializations of Indian rape culture which emerged in the context of the "Indian Mutiny…
Where is home?” Here and there: Transnational experiences of home among Canadian migrants in the United States
The Study of Gender in India: A Partial Review
The main purpose of this article is to broaden U.S. scholars' awareness of the similarities and differences of gender literature in another part of the world. In providing this partial review of gender scholarship in India, the authors hope to foster critical reflection on the inequities of global knowledge production and consumption and the role of U.S. academic institutions and scholars in this project. The article is written not by scholars wh…
Beyond Asian American: Examining Conditions and Mechanisms of Earnings Inequality for Filipina and Asian Indian Women
Theories of intersectionality encourage scholars to look at how 'gender' experiences are forged through race, particularly in the labor market. This study uses data from the 2000 1-percent Public Use Microdata on 23,852 Filipina, Asian Indian, and non-Hispanic white women living in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to examine additive and interactional influences on earnings. A detailed analysis of interaction effects by race-ethnicity reveal se…
Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity
Equality and Cumulative Disadvantage: Response to Baxter and Wright
Linking research, policy and action: A look at the work of the special rapporteur on violence against women
This article focuses on the achievements and challenges in linking research, activism and policy in the making of a comprehensive international regime on women's human rights with a particular focus on the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The impact of violence against women as an international policy agenda not only opened the private sphere to public scrutiny but it has also challenged mainstream human rights practic…
I'm a different kind of biracial: How black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race
Increasingly, multiracial families have garnered scholarly attention. However, the roles of ethnicity and immigrant ties are largely absent in bi/multiracial studies. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with black/white biracial Americans with at least one immigrant parent, this study analyzes the dynamic interplay of race, ethnicity, and immigrant roots in the bi/multiracial community. Our findings show that participants struggle to articulate the…
Making a difference: Linking research and action in practice, pedagogy, and policy for social justice: Introduction
The origins and chronology of linking research and action are complex and cannot be attributed to any single discipline or any part of the world. People within and outside academe have linked research and action. In this introductory article, we begin by briefly tracing the methodological background to linking research and action, focusing particularly on action research, participatory research, and feminist research in order to situate the resea…
Why Don't South Asians in the U.S. Count As “Asian”: Global and Local Factors Shaping Anti‐South Asian Racism in the United States
In a 2020 U.S. survey, more Asian Indians than Chinese indicated that they were worried about post‐Covid‐19 hate crimes. Yet, post‐Covid violence against people of Asian background has been viewed as being directed against “Chinese‐looking” individuals. This is just one example of how South Asians are overlooked in discourses about Asian Americans. This theoretical paper provides an expansion of the racial formation framework to explain this excl…
I Can't Have My Mom Running Me Everywhere”: Adolescents, Leisure, and Accessibility
This study examined how adolescents defined leisure and problems of accessibility encountered as they attempted to pursue their chosen leisure activities. Data drawn from semi-structured interviews indicated that regardless of location, the key issue was a shared concern about the general inability to independently access leisure pursuits. Among the causes of frustration were the lack of accessible spaces as well as the social sanctions prohibiti…
Sexual Violence, Race and Media (In)Visibility: Intersectional Complexities in a Transnational Frame
Intersectional scholarship argues that women of color have distinct experiences of rape compared to white women and highlights their relative invisibility as victims compared to white women victims in news media. While the bulk of intersectional work has examined such issues within one nation and particularly within the US, in an era of increasingly transnationalized media content, we explore such intersectionalities in a transnational frame. Tha…
On the Edges of Belonging: Indian American Dalits, Queers, Guest Workers and Questions of Ethnic Belonging
Questions of assimilation and belonging remain as important themes in the immigration and ethnicity literature. Most research focuses on ethnic groups and their sense of belonging to the societies they live in, with less attention given to processes that affect belonging among ethnic subgroups. Using primary and secondary data, we examine cases of three Indian-origin groups – Dalits, Queers and Guest Workers – in the USA to discuss the structures…
Hidden in Plain Sight: “Neutral” Enclosures for High‐Skilled Immigrants During Covid‐19 1
Politicians and mainstream media in the EU, UK, and US regularly emphasize the need for highly skilled migrants, but, over the last few decades, the terms and conditions for these highly skilled migrants have changed drastically. As part of the neoliberal migrant control regime, highly skilled migrants are brought to countries under very restrictive conditions. They work and contribute taxes but have few to no political rights. Based on data on h…
Migration, migrants, and human security
This introductory article outlines a framework to bridge some of the current fragmentation and knowledge hierarchies in the sociological field of migration. The article builds on the insights - and epistemological roots - used in different parts of the world to reflect on 21st-century realities of migration and human security. It considers international migrants, internally displaced persons, refugees and trafficked persons as part of a continuum…
We Cannot Go There, They Cannot Come Here: Dispersed Care, Asian Indian Immigrant Families and the Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted families and displaced individuals. For migrant workers, these disruptions and displacements exacerbated the state-imposed constraints on family formation. But how did high-skilled and high-wage immigrants, presumably immune from these challenges, provide care to and receive care from families during the pandemic? Based on 33 in-depth interviews with high-skilled Asian Indian immigrants in the USA during the pandem…
What Can We Learn about Migration and Migrants from Southern Scholars? A Brief Discussion
Within the United States, there is a dominant focus on international migration and international migrants' assimilation and integration efforts, along with separate conversations on intersecting structures that marginalize non‐white migrants and citizens. Trafficking and refugee studies are relatively small and distinct fields that mostly remain outside dominant scholarly conversations on migration, especially in sociology. This essay presents on…
Caregiving and Care Receiving Among Asian Indian Immigrants in the Usa During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This study examines the intersection of wellbeing and care experienced by first-generation Asian Indian high-skilled immigrants in the USA in spaces varying from the home to the neighborhood, city, and state in sending and receiving countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 resulted in new stressors that affected the physical, mental, and emotional health of interviewees, but many found ways to mitigate the effects of the pan…
De Jure vs. De Facto Rights: A Response to “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology”
Blau's ( ) argument for a Constitutional Project implies that changes in the U.S. Constitution would ensure fundamental adherence to human rights standards. We disagree with the assumption that legal and institutional instruments are guarantors of human rights practice. Instead, we see rights practices as the function of power struggles that include but go far beyond formal law. Instead, we emphasize an important distinction between de jure human…
Constructing Transnational and Virtual Ethnic Identities: A Study of the Discourse and Networks of Ethnic Student Organisations in the USA and UK
This paper draws on the experiences of Indian-origin groups in the USA and UK to examine transnational forms of ethnicity. It focuses specifically on ethnic organisations that are engaged in constructing transnational ethnic identities, using religion as a means for constructing new, virtually linked communities. Based on web-based data of Hindu student groups in the USA and UK, this study examines transnational ethnic identities these groups dep…
Living religions across transnational spaces: Experiences of South Asian American Hindu and Muslim women
This paper focuses on women of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin in the US diaspora to examine how religious identities unfold within multi-layered transnational structures that range from political histories and events to active webs of family and community relationships that stretch across the diaspora. Our analysis draws on focus groups and interviews with highly educated Hindu and Muslim women in the US. For these women, approaches to …
I Can't Have My Mom Running Me Everywhere”: Adolescents, Leisure, and Accessibility
This study examined how adolescents defined leisure and problems of accessibility encountered as they attempted to pursue their chosen leisure activities. Data drawn from semi-structured interviews indicated that regardless of location, the key issue was a shared concern about the general inability to independently access leisure pursuits. Among the causes of frustration were the lack of accessible spaces as well as the social sanctions prohibiti…
Equality and Cumulative Disadvantage: Response to Baxter and Wright
Collected Essays
The Study of Gender in India: A Partial Review
The main purpose of this article is to broaden U.S. scholars' awareness of the similarities and differences of gender literature in another part of the world. In providing this partial review of gender scholarship in India, the authors hope to foster critical reflection on the inequities of global knowledge production and consumption and the role of U.S. academic institutions and scholars in this project. The article is written not by scholars wh…
Skilled migration and cumulative disadvantage: The case of highly qualified Asian Indian immigrant women in the US
Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity
Beyond Asian American: Examining Conditions and Mechanisms of Earnings Inequality for Filipina and Asian Indian Women
Theories of intersectionality encourage scholars to look at how 'gender' experiences are forged through race, particularly in the labor market. This study uses data from the 2000 1-percent Public Use Microdata on 23,852 Filipina, Asian Indian, and non-Hispanic white women living in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to examine additive and interactional influences on earnings. A detailed analysis of interaction effects by race-ethnicity reveal se…
Where is home?” Here and there: Transnational experiences of home among Canadian migrants in the United States
Another world of experience? Transnational contexts and the experiences of South Asian Americans
Despite discussions about freely circulating people, ideas, media images, money, technology in a flat world in the popular media, new political, economic, and technological formations continue to construct restrictive social hierarchies that disproportionately affect socially marked groups. This paper focuses on South Asian Americans to systematically examine how these forces have created a transnational context that works through and across mult…
Interrogating Intersectionality: Contemporary Globalisation and Racialised Gendering in the Lives of Highly Educated South Asian Americans and their Children
This paper examines the fit of the intersectionality framework for understanding transnational lives. The data for this paper is drawn from my research on South Asian migrants to America and their children, the 1.5 and 2nd generation. I focus on these highly educated migrants and their children and their efforts to maintain meaningful family ties and live religions in a context that spans the USA and selected South Asian countries. I use this dat…
Talking ‘gender superiority’ in virtual spaces: Web‐based discourses of Hindu student groups in the US and UK
This study focuses on the public assertion of gendered ethno‐religious identities on the websites of Hindu student groups (HSGs) in the South Asian Diaspora in the USA and UK. HSGs are a part of a larger phenomenon of individuals and organizations engaged in creating and promoting ethnicities in virtual spaces. In this paper we focus particularly on the HSGs deployment of ‘strong woman’ imagery to assert their ‘superior cultures’. We find that wh…
Constructing Transnational and Virtual Ethnic Identities: A Study of the Discourse and Networks of Ethnic Student Organisations in the USA and UK
This paper draws on the experiences of Indian-origin groups in the USA and UK to examine transnational forms of ethnicity. It focuses specifically on ethnic organisations that are engaged in constructing transnational ethnic identities, using religion as a means for constructing new, virtually linked communities. Based on web-based data of Hindu student groups in the USA and UK, this study examines transnational ethnic identities these groups dep…
As the Leaves Turn Gold: Asian Americans and Experiences of Aging
As the Leaves Turn Gold examines the challenges and opportunities around aging for Asian American women and men in the United States. The book looks at a range of Asian Americans—affluent and poor, third-generation natives and recent immigrants, political exiles and recent migrants, people who immigrated early in life and those who immigrated late in life—and features interview excerpts that bring these issues to life. The book shows how the life…
Intersectionality in a Transnational World
Linking research, policy and action: A look at the work of the special rapporteur on violence against women
This article focuses on the achievements and challenges in linking research, activism and policy in the making of a comprehensive international regime on women's human rights with a particular focus on the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The impact of violence against women as an international policy agenda not only opened the private sphere to public scrutiny but it has also challenged mainstream human rights practic…
Making a difference: Linking research and action in practice, pedagogy, and policy for social justice: Introduction
The origins and chronology of linking research and action are complex and cannot be attributed to any single discipline or any part of the world. People within and outside academe have linked research and action. In this introductory article, we begin by briefly tracing the methodological background to linking research and action, focusing particularly on action research, participatory research, and feminist research in order to situate the resea…
On the Edges of Belonging: Indian American Dalits, Queers, Guest Workers and Questions of Ethnic Belonging
Questions of assimilation and belonging remain as important themes in the immigration and ethnicity literature. Most research focuses on ethnic groups and their sense of belonging to the societies they live in, with less attention given to processes that affect belonging among ethnic subgroups. Using primary and secondary data, we examine cases of three Indian-origin groups – Dalits, Queers and Guest Workers – in the USA to discuss the structures…
Sexual Violence, Race and Media (In)Visibility: Intersectional Complexities in a Transnational Frame
Intersectional scholarship argues that women of color have distinct experiences of rape compared to white women and highlights their relative invisibility as victims compared to white women victims in news media. While the bulk of intersectional work has examined such issues within one nation and particularly within the US, in an era of increasingly transnationalized media content, we explore such intersectionalities in a transnational frame. Tha…
Beyond saving faces: Survivors of acid attacks in Pakistan
I am only half alive: Organ trafficking in Pakistan amid interlocking oppressions
This article delves into the gendered/classed phenomenon of organ trafficking based on ethnographic and archival data from Pakistan. Drawing upon experiences of victims of organ trafficking, the authors situate trafficking for organ trade within a global-national-local political economy of human trafficking. They argue that the theoretical focus on women in discussions of gendered sex trafficking, and a separate discussion on labor trafficking co…
(Re)Telling traditions: The language of social identity among queer South Asians in the United States
Social science scholarship recognises language as a key medium through which we construct our realities and shape our identities. This has led to a stream of research on the intersections of language and social identity. Yet, few studies examine language and queer identities in the diaspora. In an attempt to extend this field of analysis, we focus on queer South Asians in the U.S.. Based on 30 in-depth interviews and content analysis of website a…
De Jure vs. De Facto Rights: A Response to “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology”
Blau's ( ) argument for a Constitutional Project implies that changes in the U.S. Constitution would ensure fundamental adherence to human rights standards. We disagree with the assumption that legal and institutional instruments are guarantors of human rights practice. Instead, we see rights practices as the function of power struggles that include but go far beyond formal law. Instead, we emphasize an important distinction between de jure human…
I'm a different kind of biracial: How black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race
Increasingly, multiracial families have garnered scholarly attention. However, the roles of ethnicity and immigrant ties are largely absent in bi/multiracial studies. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with black/white biracial Americans with at least one immigrant parent, this study analyzes the dynamic interplay of race, ethnicity, and immigrant roots in the bi/multiracial community. Our findings show that participants struggle to articulate the…
As a woman I cannot just leave the house: Gendered spaces and HIV vulnerability in marriages in Kenya
This article analyses how spaces are implicated in extramarital sex and HIV transmission in marriage. Drawing on the experiences and practices of married women and men in Kenya, we demonstrate how intersectionality is expressed through the social organization of space to shape particular patterns of femininity and masculinity and enable, mostly, men’s infidelity and the possibility of the HIV risk. HIV mitigation policies focus mostly on altering…
Migration, migrants, and human security
This introductory article outlines a framework to bridge some of the current fragmentation and knowledge hierarchies in the sociological field of migration. The article builds on the insights - and epistemological roots - used in different parts of the world to reflect on 21st-century realities of migration and human security. It considers international migrants, internally displaced persons, refugees and trafficked persons as part of a continuum…
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (37 works) · Gender Studies (27 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (15 works) · Ethnic group (13 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (13 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (11 works) · Gender Studies (11 works)