B Coutin
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 17890 |
|---|---|
| NOME | B Coutin |
| PRENOMES | B |
| SOBRENOME | Coutin |
| ASSINATURA | COUTIN B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1065-2769 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 740 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 59 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1995 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
Insurgent bureaucrats in local government
This article examines how marginalized bureaucrats transform into collective actors, “insurgent bureaucrats,” who advance equity and social justice within local government. Drawing on field theory and a case study of Mayville, California, we analyze how bureaucrats in a newly created Office of Equity formed networks and mounted challenges against dominant forces in the bureaucratic field. We identify five key elements explaining this transformati…
Competing definitions of belonging in urban spaces
Cities have emerged as key sites where ‘belonging’ is defined and contested. In the United States, during the 2010s, nationalist projects sought to restrict immigration, leading some cities to reconfigure the boundaries of local membership by adopting welcoming policies. Then, in the 2020s, racial justice movements refocused attention on historic racial disparities. This new emphasis forged connections across forms of marginalisation but rendered…
Banished Men
La gouvernance des immigrés à l’échelle de la ville
Cet entretien revient sur le concept d’ « adminigration » avec Susan Coutin et Walter Nicholls, professeurs à l’université de Californie à Irvine. Les deux chercheurs expliquent la pertinence de ce concept qu’ils définissent comme « la gouvernance des immigrés par le biais de politiques et de programmes à l’échelle de la ville, qu’ils soient ou non explicitement axés sur les immigrés »
Adminigration
The concept of adminigration provides a much-needed lens in theorizing immigration enforcement, citizenship, and urban geographies. We define adminigration as the governance of immigrant community members through city-level policies and programs, whether or not these explicitly focus on immigrants. Our focus on adminigration involves three theoretical interventions: (1) bridging literature on immigrant bureaucratic incorporation and crimmigration…
The craft of translation
This article builds on anthropological research on bureaucratic inscription as a power-laden process to explore the craft of document translation in contexts of immigration legal advocacy. In a legal climate characterized by suspicion and resource scarcity, immigrants who seek to regularize their status in the United States face steep evidentiary challenges, including the requirement that all documentation, including records from their countries …
Beyond Borders
States have long denied basic rights to non-citizens within their borders, and international law imposes only limited duties on states with respect to those fleeing persecution. But even the limited rights previously enjoyed by non-citizens are eroding in the face of rising nationalism, populism, xenophobia, and racism. Beyond Borders explores what obligations we owe to those outside our political community. Drawing on contributions from a broad …
Exiled Home
In Exiled Home, Susan Bibler Coutin recounts the experiences of Salvadoran children who migrated with their families to the United States during the 1980-1992 civil war. Because of their youth and the violence they left behind, as well as their uncertain legal status in the United States, many grew up with distant memories of El Salvador and a profound sense of disjuncture in their adopted homeland. Through interviews in both countries, Coutin ex…
Insurgent Collaboration
Scholarship regarding those who are categorized as undocumented can put sanctuary principles into practice in research settings. To do so, scholars can conduct research in collaboration with immigrant communities, reject essentializing terminology, develop modes of sociality that challenge exclusion, and document the unofficial forms of sanctuary devised by members of immigrant communities. This research model is grounded in principles of accompa…
Living Documents in Transnational Spaces of Migration between El Salvador and the United States
The expansion of immigration enforcement in the United States has increased the documentation requirements to which immigrants are subjected. A case in point is birth certificates, which are used to establish identity, nationality, age, and kin relationships in myriad US immigration cases. This development gives highly localized bureaucratic practices in immigrants’ countries of origin transnational implications. Based on fieldwork in a registry …
Racialization through Enforcement
Immigration law and enforcement choices have enhanced the salience of Latino racial identity in the United States. Yet, to date, courts and administrative agencies have proven remarkably reluctant to confront head on the role of race in immigration enforcement practices. Courts improperly conflate legal nationality and ‘national origin’, thereby cloaking in legality impermissible profiling based on national origin. Courts also maintain the primac…
Sovereign intimacies
In the United States, the doctrine of plenary power grants the federal government considerable discretion in formulating US immigration policies. With only limited court review, the executive and legislative branches of government can create or abrogate immigration policies quite suddenly. This produces extreme uncertainty in the lives of noncitizens, who must collect check stubs, bills, medical records, and other documents in hopes of eventually…
Deferred action and the discretionary state
In the United States, the lives of undocumented people have become increasingly precarious due to increased surveillance, enforcement, criminalization, and detention. In this context, deferred action, a form of prosecutorial discretion in which the government declines to pursue removal and provides temporary work authorization, has become a source of both hope and vulnerability. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and legal analysis, we delineate the…
Crossing Borders and Criminalizing Identity
This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). Th…
Migrant Narratives and Ethnographic Tropes
Tragic stories of border crossings are often central to accounts of migration, and as ethnographers we are privy to stories of clandestine crossings, painful separations, and unspeakable loss. In the process of writing, ethnographers make these stories central to their own arguments and in so doing, those crossings, separations, and losses become knowable, imaginable, and part of a larger story of global interconnectedness and inequality. Ethnogr…
Deportation Studies
The new field of deportation studies emerged at the intersection of immigration and security studies in the early 2000s. Focusing on deportation raises new questions about migration and enforcement tactics, but reproduces assumptions about the nature of movement and the centrality of the state in enforcement efforts. Through ethnographic work on deportation in various regions of the world, this volume questions these assumptions and emphasises im…
Technologies of truth in the anthropology of conflict
Science and technology studies can help to unveil invisible modes of power that are embedded in the ways conflicts are known, debated, and resolved. Legal forms of adjudication, reporting systems used by international commissions, and data gathering on the part of governmental and nongovernmental agencies shape how conflicts are fought out on the ground and in policy arenas. Assumptions about evidence, categorization, adjudication, and measuremen…
Is There a Canon of Law and Society
As an interdisciplinary field, law and society has an ambivalent relationship with the notion of a canon: Being a field requires having a recognized set of key texts, even as this particular field's critique of doctrinal legal analysis creates an openness toward alternative perspectives. Within the interdisciplinary field of law and society itself, there is debate about the breadth of disciplines relevant to this domain of inquiry. To explore thi…
In the Breach
To analyze the forms of membership that are created in the gap between formal citizenship and social belonging, this paper takes up three examples of citizenship in the breach: (1) the 1980-1992 Salvadoran civil war, in which human rights abuses perpetrated in El Salvador effectively constituted Salvadoran migrants as stateless persons, though technically they held Salvadoran citizenship; (2) informal U.S. membership claims put forward by longtim…
Place and presence within Salvadoran deportees' narratives of removal
Based on life history interviews conducted with 1.5 generation Salvadorans who were raised in the United States and then deported to El Salvador, this article examines the displaced subjectivities being produced through intensified deportation regimes. Current theorizations of deportation are extended by examining the transition to illegality experienced by youth who may have thought their place in the United States was secure. Youths' narratives…
Transnational alienage and foreignness
The literature on transnationalism has emphasised the ways that citizenship practices can transcend borders, for example, enabling migrants to use resources acquired outside of their country of origin to engage politically within it. This literature has not, however, addressed how migrants fall outside of rather than transcend national boundaries. To analyse this condition, we develop the concepts of transnational alienage and foreignness and app…
Introduction
Legacies and origins of the 1980s US–Central American sanctuary movement - 1
Riding la Bestia with Central American and Mexican Migrant Children Which Way Home . Directed by Rebecca Cammisa. Executive Producers
The Rights of Noncitizens in the United States
Over the past three decades, sociolegal scholarship on the rights of noncitizens in the United States has sought to explain rights and exclusions while incorporating new theory regarding racialization, biopolitics, neoliberalism, risk, and states of exception. Early work in this period distinguished between legal and illegal immigration, with a focus on assimilation, ethnicity, and new ethnic enclaves in the case of the former, and an examination…
Falling Outside
This article takes a retrospective look at legal advocacy on behalf of Central American asylum seekers, which has been influential in the development of US asylum law and in the creation of an infrastructure to address immigrants' needs. The article considers three time periods when Central Americans have been deemed to fall outside of the category of refugee: (1) the 1980s, when US administrations argued that Central Americans were economic immi…
Being En Route
Through an ethnography of unauthorized migration from El Salvador to the United States, I explore "clandestinity" as a hidden, yet known, dimension of social reality. Unauthorized migrants who are en route to the United States have to make themselves absent from the spaces they occupy. When they become clandestine, such migrants embody illegality; in some cases, they literally "go underground" should they die and be buried en route. Because their…
Confined within
Contesting criminality
As a field, criminology has paid insufficient attention to societal processes that obscure the distinction between legality and illegality, decriminalize formerly objectionable behavior or redefine law-breakers as deserving members of society. An analysis of undocumented immigrants’ efforts to redefine themselves as legal residents highlights ways that the category of the criminal is rendered unstable, suggests that logics of social control creat…
Remitting subjects
Scholars' and policy-makers' interest in the remittances that migrants send home to relatives has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Focusing on remittances from the United States to El Salvador, we examine how academic studies, public discourse, and state accounting practices simultaneously produce and reveal the nature of this phenomenon. By treating the money that migrants send home as both national resource and foreign currency, …
Your friend, the illegal
The U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) created a new legal category, "illegal immigrant eligible for amnesty." Media coverage of IRCA provides an opportunity to analyze the connections between the legal and cultural discourses in which identities are created and contested. From our analysis of media images of amnesty applicants, citizens, and illegal alines in 283 news articles, we find that journalists not only debated the ca…
Falling Outside
This article takes a retrospective look at legal advocacy on behalf of Central American asylum seekers, which has been influential in the development of US asylum law and in the creation of an infrastructure to address immigrants' needs. The article considers three time periods when Central Americans have been deemed to fall outside of the category of refugee: (1) the 1980s, when US administrations argued that Central Americans were economic immi…
Deportation Studies
The new field of deportation studies emerged at the intersection of immigration and security studies in the early 2000s. Focusing on deportation raises new questions about migration and enforcement tactics, but reproduces assumptions about the nature of movement and the centrality of the state in enforcement efforts. Through ethnographic work on deportation in various regions of the world, this volume questions these assumptions and emphasises im…
Technologies of truth in the anthropology of conflict
Science and technology studies can help to unveil invisible modes of power that are embedded in the ways conflicts are known, debated, and resolved. Legal forms of adjudication, reporting systems used by international commissions, and data gathering on the part of governmental and nongovernmental agencies shape how conflicts are fought out on the ground and in policy arenas. Assumptions about evidence, categorization, adjudication, and measuremen…
In the Mirror
This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as “naturalizing” some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histories and policies that allow some parents to “choose” babies while others must abandon them; and chall…
Sovereign intimacies
In the United States, the doctrine of plenary power grants the federal government considerable discretion in formulating US immigration policies. With only limited court review, the executive and legislative branches of government can create or abrogate immigration policies quite suddenly. This produces extreme uncertainty in the lives of noncitizens, who must collect check stubs, bills, medical records, and other documents in hopes of eventually…
The Rights of Noncitizens in the United States
Over the past three decades, sociolegal scholarship on the rights of noncitizens in the United States has sought to explain rights and exclusions while incorporating new theory regarding racialization, biopolitics, neoliberalism, risk, and states of exception. Early work in this period distinguished between legal and illegal immigration, with a focus on assimilation, ethnicity, and new ethnic enclaves in the case of the former, and an examination…
Smugglers or samaritans in Tucson, Arizona
In 1985-86, 11 religious activists whose congregations had declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees were tried in Tucson, Arizona, on alien-smuggling charges. Although 8 of the 11 were convicted and although the verdicts were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the social and legal significance of the trial, and of the sanctuary movement itself, has continued to be negotiated by sanctuary activists. Examin…
The Oppressed, the Suspect, and the Citizen
By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims'accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S. asylum law. In the United States, asylum is available to aliens whose gooernments fail to protect them from persecution on the basis of their race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group membership. Salvador…
Crossing Borders and Criminalizing Identity
This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). Th…
From Refugees to Immigrants
The legalization strategies pursued by Salvadoran immigrants and activists from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that migrants’ and advocates’ responses to policy changes reinterpret law in ways that affect future policy. Law is critical to immigrants’ strategies in that legal status is increasingly a prerequisite for rights and services and that immigration law is embedded in other institutions and relationships. Immigration law is defined, …
Deferred action and the discretionary state
In the United States, the lives of undocumented people have become increasingly precarious due to increased surveillance, enforcement, criminalization, and detention. In this context, deferred action, a form of prosecutorial discretion in which the government declines to pursue removal and provides temporary work authorization, has become a source of both hope and vulnerability. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and legal analysis, we delineate the…
From Refugees to Immigrants
The legalization strategies pursued by Salvadoran immigrants and activists from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that migrants' and advocates' responses to policy changes reinterpret law in ways that affect future policy.Law is critical to immigrants' strategies in that legal status is increasingly a prerequisite for rights and services and that immigration law is embedded in other institutions and relationships.Immigration law is defined, ho…
In the Breach
To analyze the forms of membership that are created in the gap between formal citizenship and social belonging, this paper takes up three examples of citizenship in the breach: (1) the 1980-1992 Salvadoran civil war, in which human rights abuses perpetrated in El Salvador effectively constituted Salvadoran migrants as stateless persons, though technically they held Salvadoran citizenship; (2) informal U.S. membership claims put forward by longtim…
Living Documents in Transnational Spaces of Migration between El Salvador and the United States
The expansion of immigration enforcement in the United States has increased the documentation requirements to which immigrants are subjected. A case in point is birth certificates, which are used to establish identity, nationality, age, and kin relationships in myriad US immigration cases. This development gives highly localized bureaucratic practices in immigrants’ countries of origin transnational implications. Based on fieldwork in a registry …
Migrant Narratives and Ethnographic Tropes
Tragic stories of border crossings are often central to accounts of migration, and as ethnographers we are privy to stories of clandestine crossings, painful separations, and unspeakable loss. In the process of writing, ethnographers make these stories central to their own arguments and in so doing, those crossings, separations, and losses become knowable, imaginable, and part of a larger story of global interconnectedness and inequality. Ethnogr…
Legacies and Origins of the 1980s US-Central American Sanctuary Movement
This article re-examines the US–Central American sanctuary movement of the 1980s.Our re-examination is motivated by two factors.First, with the passage of time it is possible to discern the movement’s origins in ways that could not be fully articulated while it was ongoing.We are able to show how certain relationships between the movement’s North and Central American activists were celebrated, while others were obscured due to fear for Salvado…
Citizenship and Clandestiny among Salvadoran Immigrants
Naming Resistance
Ethnographic analyses of political dissidence are deeply implicated in the political contests about which ethnographers write. A comparison of the authors' fieldwork among dissidents in Argentina, Kenya, and the United States reveals both the differing dynamics of contests over the political and the complex ways that ethnographers are situated within such contests. In Argentina during the last period of military rule it was dangerous to be define…
Ethnographies of Violence
Les AA. montrent en quoi la loi constitue une alternative a la violence et cela au travers de l'etude de travaux anthropologiques. Ils examinent les mecanismes de legitimation de la force et s'attachent a savoir en quoi la force non-autorisee tend a etre consideree comme violence, comme une violation du contrat social. Ils examinent donc le lien entre loi et violence. Ils montrent que la loi n'est pas purement verbale ou l'expression d'une ideolo…
The craft of translation
This article builds on anthropological research on bureaucratic inscription as a power-laden process to explore the craft of document translation in contexts of immigration legal advocacy. In a legal climate characterized by suspicion and resource scarcity, immigrants who seek to regularize their status in the United States face steep evidentiary challenges, including the requirement that all documentation, including records from their countries …
The Culture of Protest
Your friend, the illegal
The U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) created a new legal category, "illegal immigrant eligible for amnesty." Media coverage of IRCA provides an opportunity to analyze the connections between the legal and cultural discourses in which identities are created and contested. From our analysis of media images of amnesty applicants, citizens, and illegal alines in 283 news articles, we find that journalists not only debated the ca…
Ethnographies of Violence
Les AA. montrent en quoi la loi constitue une alternative a la violence et cela au travers de l'etude de travaux anthropologiques. Ils examinent les mecanismes de legitimation de la force et s'attachent a savoir en quoi la force non-autorisee tend a etre consideree comme violence, comme une violation du contrat social. Ils examinent donc le lien entre loi et violence. Ils montrent que la loi n'est pas purement verbale ou l'expression d'une ideolo…
Smugglers or samaritans in Tucson, Arizona
In 1985-86, 11 religious activists whose congregations had declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees were tried in Tucson, Arizona, on alien-smuggling charges. Although 8 of the 11 were convicted and although the verdicts were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the social and legal significance of the trial, and of the sanctuary movement itself, has continued to be negotiated by sanctuary activists. Examin…
The Possibility of Popular Justice
United States
Deciding To Be Legal
From Refugees to Immigrants
The legalization strategies pursued by Salvadoran immigrants and activists from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that migrants’ and advocates’ responses to policy changes reinterpret law in ways that affect future policy. Law is critical to immigrants’ strategies in that legal status is increasingly a prerequisite for rights and services and that immigration law is embedded in other institutions and relationships. Immigration law is defined, …
From Refugees to Immigrants
The legalization strategies pursued by Salvadoran immigrants and activists from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that migrants' and advocates' responses to policy changes reinterpret law in ways that affect future policy.Law is critical to immigrants' strategies in that legal status is increasingly a prerequisite for rights and services and that immigration law is embedded in other institutions and relationships.Immigration law is defined, ho…
Naming Resistance
Ethnographic analyses of political dissidence are deeply implicated in the political contests about which ethnographers write. A comparison of the authors' fieldwork among dissidents in Argentina, Kenya, and the United States reveals both the differing dynamics of contests over the political and the complex ways that ethnographers are situated within such contests. In Argentina during the last period of military rule it was dangerous to be define…
Finding a Moral Heart for U.S. Immigration Policy
In this short but complex monograph Heyman uses his expertise as an ethnographer of both borderlands and border enforcers to devise moral and practical improvements in U.S. immigration policy. Heyman argues persuasively that current U.S. immigration policies are both unjust and unworkable. They are unjust, he contends, because they are fueled by antiimmigrationism, a sentiment that fails to recognize the common humanity of others. They are unwork…
Note Regarding the Symposium
Citizenship and Clandestiny among Salvadoran Immigrants
Advocating for Immigrants' Rights
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
The Oppressed, the Suspect, and the Citizen
By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims'accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S. asylum law. In the United States, asylum is available to aliens whose gooernments fail to protect them from persecution on the basis of their race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group membership. Salvador…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
In the Mirror
This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as “naturalizing” some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histories and policies that allow some parents to “choose” babies while others must abandon them; and chall…
Border Games
The Network Inside Out
The Network Inside Out Annelise Riles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000
Fragmented Ties
Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Cecilia Menjívar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii. 301 pp., map, tables, appendixes, notes, references, index
Cultural logics of belonging and movement Transnationalism, naturalization, and U.S. immigration politics
In the United States, unprecedented high numbers of naturalization applicants, the adoption of restrictive immigration policies, changing demographics, and the 1996 presidential election coalesced in the mid‐1990s to make naturalization simultaneously a high priority and problematic. Salvadorans who had immigrated during the 1980s and who were still struggling for the opportunity to naturalize were caught up in these dynamics. A juxtaposition of …
Suspension of Deportation Hearings and Measures of "Americanness"
Una forma de identificar las características que, según las autoridades y la ley, el ciudadano ideal debe de tener es estudiar casos de inmigración en corte. Por medio de observar la preparatión de tales casos, entrevistar a abogados y solicitantes, y asistir a audiencias en la corte federal de inmigración en Los Angeles, se analiza estas características. La investigatión se enfoca en los casos conocidos como "suspensión de deportatión". Para gan…
Suspension of Deportation Hearings and Measures of "Americanness"
Una forma de identificar las caracterfsticas que, segiin las autoridades y la ley, el ciudadano ideal debe de tener es estudiar casos de inmigraci6n en corte.Por medio de observar la preparation de tales casos, entrevistar a abogados y solicitantes, y asistir a audiencias en la corte federal de inmigracion en Los Angeles, se analiza estas caracterfsticas.La investigation se enfoca en los casos conocidos como "suspension de deportation".Para ganar…
The Odyssey Of Salvadoran Asylum Seekers
(2004). The Odyssey Of Salvadoran Asylum Seekers. NACLA Report on the Americas: Vol. 37, No. 6, pp. 38-43
Political science (46 obras) · Sociology (46 obras) · Law (40 obras) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (30 obras) · Immigration (29 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Criminology (17 obras) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (15 obras) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (14 obras)