Natasha Iskander
Biographic Data
| ID | 3590448 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Natasha Iskander |
| GIVEN NAMES | Natasha |
| FAMILY NAME | Iskander |
| SIGNATURE | ISKANDER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
America's arrival city: How immigration made New York and how immigrant exclusion almost destroyed it: commentary on “Global commerce, immigration and diversity: a New York story” by Philip Kasinitz
New York is America’s quintessential arrival city. The city’s defining institutions; its economy; its skyscrapers, parks and infrastructure; its schools, hospitals and social services and its cultural ecosystem have all been produced through the city’s reception of the millions that have arrived at its shores. Nevertheless, New York’s urban policy has consistently defined immigrants as blight. Urban planning policies, especially those that addres…
Biophilic Institutions: Building New Solidarities between the Economy & Nature
Climate change and economic insecurity are the two most pressing challenges for modern humanity, and they are intimately linked: climate warming intensifies existing structural inequities, just as economic disparities worsen climate-induced suffering. Yet precisely because this economy-nature interrelationship is institutionalized, there exists an opening for alternative institutional configurations to take root. In this essay, we make the case f…
The centre cannot hold: Arrival, margins, and the politics of ambivalence introduction to ‘arrival at the margins’, a special issue of migration studies
This special issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility. Taken together, the studies collected in this volume are a call to view margins as vital socio-political spaces and objects of study. They are created, transformed, or maintained through interactions among the multiple ethni…
A Forum on the Politics of Skills
The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definitio…
Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond
Does Skill Make Us Human: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond
An in-depth look at Qatar's migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and powerSkill-specifically the distinction between the "skilled" and "unskilled"-is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar's boo…
Turning Rules into Resources: Worker Enactment of Labor Standards and Why It Matters for Regulatory Federalism
Labor standards are not just enforced; they are enacted, and often in ways that are different from their stated intention. This distinction creates an opening to consider the ways that frontline workers extend and repurpose enforcement practices. Drawing on qualitative research in two US cities, the authors focus on Latino immigrant construction workers to identify the strategies they use to rework formal safety mandates to advance technical know…
Climate Change and Work: Politics and Power
Climate warming is the fundamental challenge of our time, not only because it will radically transform our natural environment but also because it will redefine jobs and livelihoods. This article builds an interpretive bridge for understanding the political consequences of how climate change pressures will affect work, production, and technology. We organize this review along three themes: commodification and the processes through which costs and…
On Detention and Skill: Reflections on Immigrant Incarceration, Bodying Practices, and the Definition of Skill
The use of detention as a tool of immigrant enforcement has grown in the United States and around the world. In this article, I examine the practices used to structure the physical detention of immigrants and explore the role that carceral immigrant control plays as a form of labor market governance. I argue that the same security and detention practices that equate being out of status with criminality are also used to tag immigrants as unskilled…
Immigration and the Politics of Skill
Skill has played a central role in immigration scholarship, most notably in a protracted debate over whether ‘unskilled’ immigrants threaten job security for less or moderately educated native-born workers. In recent years, scholars have re-examined whether immigrant workers, particularly those with limited formal education, are unskilled. Extending this further, the chapter argues that immigrants are not simply individuals that possess, acquire,…
Partners in Organizing: Engagement between Migrants and the State in the Production of Mexican Hometown Associations
How normative debates about immigration shape analyses of the assimilation processes of second-generation youth: Lessons from Spanish Legacies
In Spanish Legacies, Portes, Aparicio, and Haller offer the results of their longitudinal study on the assimilation of the children of immigrants in Spanish society. Thanks to their study design, which parallels the earlier Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study conducted by Portes and Rumbaut, the authors are able to compare assimilation trajectories in Spain with those of second-generation youth in the United States. This comparison raises i…
"The Right to Have "Society in the Bones: The Skill and Bodies of Male Workers in Qatar
Scholars of gender and work have considered the gendered interpretation of embodied skill, and have shown how discourses about gender inform the visibility of skill and the value attributed to it. In their focus on discourse, they have overlooked the impact of institutional structures in shaping how skill is valued. This essay considers the situation of male workers in Qatar's construction industry to argue that gender analyses of work should pay…
Power Through Problem Solving: Latino Immigrants and the Inconsistencies of Economic Restructuring
Employment restructuring is a transformative process that brings about significant changes in how work is organised and experienced. Scholars who study restructuring in industries that employ large numbers of immigrant workers, including construction, food processing, or janitorial services, often point to the undermining effects of this transformation on industry wage standards, working conditions, and training supports. But often missing from t…
Celebrating the Enduring Contribution of Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies
Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf . Edited by Abdulhadi Khalaf, Omar AlShehabi, and Adam Hanieh
In the introduction to ‘Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf’, a new edited volume on migration to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Omar AlShehabi writes that the region’s policies have, over the past century, transformed the Gulf into a space that resembles ‘a collection of scattered “labor camps”, rather than a set of cohesive and integrated societies’ (p. 5). The aim of the volume, dispatched very effecti…
Emigration and Political Development
Learning in Place: Immigrants' Spatial and Temporal Strategies for Occupational Advancement
Studies of low-wage workers have long recognized the role of space in mediating access to employment. Significantly less attention has been paid to the ways in which space informs workers' ability to develop the attributes that would make them more employable. In this article, we address this gap through an examination of how immigrant workers use the relative spatial organization of residence and production to cultivate the skills that enable th…
Building Job Quality from the inside-out: Mexican Immigrants, Skills, and Jobs in the Construction Industry
Using an ethnographic case study of Mexican immigrant construction workers in two U.S. cities and in Mexico, the authors illustrate the contribution of immigrant skill as a resource for changing workplace practices. As a complement to explanations that situate the protection of job quality and the defense of skill to external institutions, the authors show that immigrants use collective learning practices to improve job quality from inside the wo…
Street Vendors, Television Extras, Walmart Stockers, and More: Worker Subjectivity and Labor Processes in Atypical Work
This essay reviews Enrique de la Garza Toledo's anthology on atypical work, titled Trabajo no clásico, organización y acción colectiva (Vols. 1 & 2) and situates it within the larger tradition of Latin American sociology of work. It argues that the anthology merges an emphasis on labor processes in a specific industry with an attention to the subjectivities and relationships that support worker agency and labor movements. Moreover, it posits that…
Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico
At the turn of the twenty-first century, with the amount of money emigrants sent home soaring to new highs, governments around the world began searching for ways to capitalize on emigration for economic growth, and they looked to nations that already had policies in place. Morocco and Mexico featured prominently as sources of "best practices" in this area, with tailor-made financial instruments that brought migrants into the banking system, captu…
Hidden Talent: Tacit Skill Formation and Labor Market Incorporation of Latino Immigrants in the United States
This article examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for empl…
Revealing Talent: Informal Skills Intermediation as an Emergent Pathway to Immigrant Labor Market Incorporation
In today's fast-changing urban labor markets, skill formation is crucial to long-term income security and occupational advancement. While most studies emphasize the skills that workers acquire through formal training and educational programs, a less understood but equally important concern is how workers acquire skills through informal means and then how they demonstrate and defend skills for which they have no formal credentials. This is especia…
The Rise and Fall of a Micro-Learning Region: Mexican Immigrants and Construction in Center-South Philadelphia
This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the city's residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning prac…
Diasporas and Development: Exploring the Potential
For some time in diaspora studies, attention to remittances has overshadowed the growing impact of emigrant groups both within the social and political arenas in their homelands and with regard to fundamental economic development. The authors of Diasporas and Development redress this imbalance, focusing on three core issues: the responses of diasporas to homeland conflicts, strategies for mobilizing effective homeland investment, and the positive…
Hidden Talent: Tacit Skill Formation and Labor Market Incorporation of Latino Immigrants in the United States
This article examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for empl…
Learning in Place: Immigrants' Spatial and Temporal Strategies for Occupational Advancement
Studies of low-wage workers have long recognized the role of space in mediating access to employment. Significantly less attention has been paid to the ways in which space informs workers' ability to develop the attributes that would make them more employable. In this article, we address this gap through an examination of how immigrant workers use the relative spatial organization of residence and production to cultivate the skills that enable th…
Climate Change and Work: Politics and Power
Climate warming is the fundamental challenge of our time, not only because it will radically transform our natural environment but also because it will redefine jobs and livelihoods. This article builds an interpretive bridge for understanding the political consequences of how climate change pressures will affect work, production, and technology. We organize this review along three themes: commodification and the processes through which costs and…
Revealing Talent: Informal Skills Intermediation as an Emergent Pathway to Immigrant Labor Market Incorporation
In today's fast-changing urban labor markets, skill formation is crucial to long-term income security and occupational advancement. While most studies emphasize the skills that workers acquire through formal training and educational programs, a less understood but equally important concern is how workers acquire skills through informal means and then how they demonstrate and defend skills for which they have no formal credentials. This is especia…
The Rise and Fall of a Micro-Learning Region: Mexican Immigrants and Construction in Center-South Philadelphia
This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the city's residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning prac…
Building Job Quality from the inside-out: Mexican Immigrants, Skills, and Jobs in the Construction Industry
Using an ethnographic case study of Mexican immigrant construction workers in two U.S. cities and in Mexico, the authors illustrate the contribution of immigrant skill as a resource for changing workplace practices. As a complement to explanations that situate the protection of job quality and the defense of skill to external institutions, the authors show that immigrants use collective learning practices to improve job quality from inside the wo…
A Forum on the Politics of Skills
The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definitio…
Turning Rules into Resources: Worker Enactment of Labor Standards and Why It Matters for Regulatory Federalism
Labor standards are not just enforced; they are enacted, and often in ways that are different from their stated intention. This distinction creates an opening to consider the ways that frontline workers extend and repurpose enforcement practices. Drawing on qualitative research in two US cities, the authors focus on Latino immigrant construction workers to identify the strategies they use to rework formal safety mandates to advance technical know…
Power Through Problem Solving: Latino Immigrants and the Inconsistencies of Economic Restructuring
Employment restructuring is a transformative process that brings about significant changes in how work is organised and experienced. Scholars who study restructuring in industries that employ large numbers of immigrant workers, including construction, food processing, or janitorial services, often point to the undermining effects of this transformation on industry wage standards, working conditions, and training supports. But often missing from t…
On Detention and Skill: Reflections on Immigrant Incarceration, Bodying Practices, and the Definition of Skill
The use of detention as a tool of immigrant enforcement has grown in the United States and around the world. In this article, I examine the practices used to structure the physical detention of immigrants and explore the role that carceral immigrant control plays as a form of labor market governance. I argue that the same security and detention practices that equate being out of status with criminality are also used to tag immigrants as unskilled…
Celebrating the Enduring Contribution of Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies
America's arrival city: How immigration made New York and how immigrant exclusion almost destroyed it: commentary on “Global commerce, immigration and diversity: a New York story” by Philip Kasinitz
New York is America’s quintessential arrival city. The city’s defining institutions; its economy; its skyscrapers, parks and infrastructure; its schools, hospitals and social services and its cultural ecosystem have all been produced through the city’s reception of the millions that have arrived at its shores. Nevertheless, New York’s urban policy has consistently defined immigrants as blight. Urban planning policies, especially those that addres…
Biophilic Institutions: Building New Solidarities between the Economy & Nature
Climate change and economic insecurity are the two most pressing challenges for modern humanity, and they are intimately linked: climate warming intensifies existing structural inequities, just as economic disparities worsen climate-induced suffering. Yet precisely because this economy-nature interrelationship is institutionalized, there exists an opening for alternative institutional configurations to take root. In this essay, we make the case f…
The centre cannot hold: Arrival, margins, and the politics of ambivalence introduction to ‘arrival at the margins’, a special issue of migration studies
This special issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility. Taken together, the studies collected in this volume are a call to view margins as vital socio-political spaces and objects of study. They are created, transformed, or maintained through interactions among the multiple ethni…
How normative debates about immigration shape analyses of the assimilation processes of second-generation youth: Lessons from Spanish Legacies
In Spanish Legacies, Portes, Aparicio, and Haller offer the results of their longitudinal study on the assimilation of the children of immigrants in Spanish society. Thanks to their study design, which parallels the earlier Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study conducted by Portes and Rumbaut, the authors are able to compare assimilation trajectories in Spain with those of second-generation youth in the United States. This comparison raises i…
Diasporas and Development: Exploring the Potential
For some time in diaspora studies, attention to remittances has overshadowed the growing impact of emigrant groups both within the social and political arenas in their homelands and with regard to fundamental economic development. The authors of Diasporas and Development redress this imbalance, focusing on three core issues: the responses of diasporas to homeland conflicts, strategies for mobilizing effective homeland investment, and the positive…
Hidden Talent: Tacit Skill Formation and Labor Market Incorporation of Latino Immigrants in the United States
This article examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for empl…
Revealing Talent: Informal Skills Intermediation as an Emergent Pathway to Immigrant Labor Market Incorporation
In today's fast-changing urban labor markets, skill formation is crucial to long-term income security and occupational advancement. While most studies emphasize the skills that workers acquire through formal training and educational programs, a less understood but equally important concern is how workers acquire skills through informal means and then how they demonstrate and defend skills for which they have no formal credentials. This is especia…
The Rise and Fall of a Micro-Learning Region: Mexican Immigrants and Construction in Center-South Philadelphia
This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the city's residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning prac…
Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico
At the turn of the twenty-first century, with the amount of money emigrants sent home soaring to new highs, governments around the world began searching for ways to capitalize on emigration for economic growth, and they looked to nations that already had policies in place. Morocco and Mexico featured prominently as sources of "best practices" in this area, with tailor-made financial instruments that brought migrants into the banking system, captu…
Street Vendors, Television Extras, Walmart Stockers, and More: Worker Subjectivity and Labor Processes in Atypical Work
This essay reviews Enrique de la Garza Toledo's anthology on atypical work, titled Trabajo no clásico, organización y acción colectiva (Vols. 1 & 2) and situates it within the larger tradition of Latin American sociology of work. It argues that the anthology merges an emphasis on labor processes in a specific industry with an attention to the subjectivities and relationships that support worker agency and labor movements. Moreover, it posits that…
Learning in Place: Immigrants' Spatial and Temporal Strategies for Occupational Advancement
Studies of low-wage workers have long recognized the role of space in mediating access to employment. Significantly less attention has been paid to the ways in which space informs workers' ability to develop the attributes that would make them more employable. In this article, we address this gap through an examination of how immigrant workers use the relative spatial organization of residence and production to cultivate the skills that enable th…
Building Job Quality from the inside-out: Mexican Immigrants, Skills, and Jobs in the Construction Industry
Using an ethnographic case study of Mexican immigrant construction workers in two U.S. cities and in Mexico, the authors illustrate the contribution of immigrant skill as a resource for changing workplace practices. As a complement to explanations that situate the protection of job quality and the defense of skill to external institutions, the authors show that immigrants use collective learning practices to improve job quality from inside the wo…
Emigration and Political Development
Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf . Edited by Abdulhadi Khalaf, Omar AlShehabi, and Adam Hanieh
In the introduction to ‘Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf’, a new edited volume on migration to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Omar AlShehabi writes that the region’s policies have, over the past century, transformed the Gulf into a space that resembles ‘a collection of scattered “labor camps”, rather than a set of cohesive and integrated societies’ (p. 5). The aim of the volume, dispatched very effecti…
Power Through Problem Solving: Latino Immigrants and the Inconsistencies of Economic Restructuring
Employment restructuring is a transformative process that brings about significant changes in how work is organised and experienced. Scholars who study restructuring in industries that employ large numbers of immigrant workers, including construction, food processing, or janitorial services, often point to the undermining effects of this transformation on industry wage standards, working conditions, and training supports. But often missing from t…
Celebrating the Enduring Contribution of Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies
"The Right to Have "Society in the Bones: The Skill and Bodies of Male Workers in Qatar
Scholars of gender and work have considered the gendered interpretation of embodied skill, and have shown how discourses about gender inform the visibility of skill and the value attributed to it. In their focus on discourse, they have overlooked the impact of institutional structures in shaping how skill is valued. This essay considers the situation of male workers in Qatar's construction industry to argue that gender analyses of work should pay…
Immigration and the Politics of Skill
Skill has played a central role in immigration scholarship, most notably in a protracted debate over whether ‘unskilled’ immigrants threaten job security for less or moderately educated native-born workers. In recent years, scholars have re-examined whether immigrant workers, particularly those with limited formal education, are unskilled. Extending this further, the chapter argues that immigrants are not simply individuals that possess, acquire,…
Partners in Organizing: Engagement between Migrants and the State in the Production of Mexican Hometown Associations
How normative debates about immigration shape analyses of the assimilation processes of second-generation youth: Lessons from Spanish Legacies
In Spanish Legacies, Portes, Aparicio, and Haller offer the results of their longitudinal study on the assimilation of the children of immigrants in Spanish society. Thanks to their study design, which parallels the earlier Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study conducted by Portes and Rumbaut, the authors are able to compare assimilation trajectories in Spain with those of second-generation youth in the United States. This comparison raises i…
On Detention and Skill: Reflections on Immigrant Incarceration, Bodying Practices, and the Definition of Skill
The use of detention as a tool of immigrant enforcement has grown in the United States and around the world. In this article, I examine the practices used to structure the physical detention of immigrants and explore the role that carceral immigrant control plays as a form of labor market governance. I argue that the same security and detention practices that equate being out of status with criminality are also used to tag immigrants as unskilled…
Climate Change and Work: Politics and Power
Climate warming is the fundamental challenge of our time, not only because it will radically transform our natural environment but also because it will redefine jobs and livelihoods. This article builds an interpretive bridge for understanding the political consequences of how climate change pressures will affect work, production, and technology. We organize this review along three themes: commodification and the processes through which costs and…
Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond
Does Skill Make Us Human: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond
An in-depth look at Qatar's migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and powerSkill-specifically the distinction between the "skilled" and "unskilled"-is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar's boo…
Turning Rules into Resources: Worker Enactment of Labor Standards and Why It Matters for Regulatory Federalism
Labor standards are not just enforced; they are enacted, and often in ways that are different from their stated intention. This distinction creates an opening to consider the ways that frontline workers extend and repurpose enforcement practices. Drawing on qualitative research in two US cities, the authors focus on Latino immigrant construction workers to identify the strategies they use to rework formal safety mandates to advance technical know…
The centre cannot hold: Arrival, margins, and the politics of ambivalence introduction to ‘arrival at the margins’, a special issue of migration studies
This special issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility. Taken together, the studies collected in this volume are a call to view margins as vital socio-political spaces and objects of study. They are created, transformed, or maintained through interactions among the multiple ethni…
A Forum on the Politics of Skills
The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definitio…
America's arrival city: How immigration made New York and how immigrant exclusion almost destroyed it: commentary on “Global commerce, immigration and diversity: a New York story” by Philip Kasinitz
New York is America’s quintessential arrival city. The city’s defining institutions; its economy; its skyscrapers, parks and infrastructure; its schools, hospitals and social services and its cultural ecosystem have all been produced through the city’s reception of the millions that have arrived at its shores. Nevertheless, New York’s urban policy has consistently defined immigrants as blight. Urban planning policies, especially those that addres…
Biophilic Institutions: Building New Solidarities between the Economy & Nature
Climate change and economic insecurity are the two most pressing challenges for modern humanity, and they are intimately linked: climate warming intensifies existing structural inequities, just as economic disparities worsen climate-induced suffering. Yet precisely because this economy-nature interrelationship is institutionalized, there exists an opening for alternative institutional configurations to take root. In this essay, we make the case f…
Political science (20 works) · Economics (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Immigration (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (8 works)