Jill Koyama
Biographic Data
| ID | 87613 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jill Koyama |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jill |
| FAMILY NAME | Koyama |
| SIGNATURE | KOYAMA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arizona |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0990-4930 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 116 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Working the ruins
Educational Anthropologists Respond to the 2024 US Presidential Election
This multivocal, multimedia commentary presents some educational anthropologists' responses to the 2024 US Presidential election and events immediately following. It follows the 2017 special issue entitled "Educational Anthropologists Respond to the 2016 US Presidential Election
Coloniality and Refugee Education in the United States
In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which the schooling of refugee youth in the United States reflects ongoing coloniality in education. Drawing on data collected in a case study, conducted between 2013 and 2016, as part of a larger ongoing ethnography of a Southwest United States District school's response to refugee students, we show how the enactment of policies, pedagogies, and practices within schools reinforce the government's control…
Fabricating and positioning refugees as workers in the United States
In this paper, which draws on two years of qualitative research, I examine the ways in which refugees are positioned and position themselves in job training programs and in their initial US jobs. I provide examples of how ‘factishes’, a combination of facts and fetishes, are fabricated and position the refugees, and those working with them, in discourses associated with migration. Moving from notions of humanitarian aid to economic utility, train…
The Labeling and Positioning of Refugee Students and Their Refusal to be (Mis)Positioned
Around the world, refugees are portrayed as victims in need of humanitarian aid or alternatively, suspicious burdens on resettlement societies. These stereotypical portrayals position them as distinct from other migrants. However, in schools, students are homogenized. Here, we contribute to the fields of multicultural education and migration studies by analyzing the politics and complexities of labeling minoritized students in schools. Drawing on…
The bans on teaching CRT and other ‘divisive concepts’ in America’s public schools
The Arizona state legislature has aimed to pass a series of bills banning those in schools from teaching topics associated with inclusion, social justice, and equity. Since 2020, the legislature has targeted teaching 'critical race theory' (CRT), often (mis)using the term to refer to any ideas related to systemic discrimination and racial inequality. The debates on the need to educate children about race and racism are ongoing, and school leaders…
A Note from the Editors
Transworlding and translanguaging
Sovereignty, citizenship and educating refugees in the United States
Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected on refugee and other immigrant networks in Southern Arizona, a US–Mexico border region marked by incre…
Pushing the Boundaries
Purpose: In this study, we trace the work of refugee student–family mentors (mentors) in an Arizona school district who work across school–family boundaries. Utilizing boundary spanning theory, we examine how education leaders—teachers, school principals, assistant principals, and district administrators—work with the mentors. We document the interactions between the school leaders and the mentors and compare them with the interactions between th…
Displacement, replacement, and fragmentation in order making
The US government is regulating the flow of people into the country. It aims to 'build the wall' between the US and Mexico, repeal NAFTA, alter immigration rules, and dramatically reduce refugee resettlement. However, an estimated 1.8 million refugees and 11 million undocumented immigrants already live in the US. Drawing on data collected in a 42-month ethnography in southern Arizona, we examine the 'divergence' of sovereignty, in which multiple,…
Cultural Similarities and Differences in Relationship Goals in Intercultural Romantic Couples
Intercultural romantic relationships and multicultural families have increased in the United States and worldwide. Researchers have found that intercultural couples report high rates of conflict and relationship instability, which may be partly explained by differences between partners in relationship goals (e.g., how much intimacy is desired and how to approach conflict). Using data from 40 intercultural couples (N = 80), we test whether greater…
Separating families, recuperating the “nation-as-family”
This study investigates the intersections of policy, affect, and the lives of migrant youth. We approach the Trump Administration’s contingent reversal of a “zero tolerance” family separation policy as an illustrative case for understanding how affect mediates policy-making processes. Combining Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) and affect studies, we analyze 184 print media texts between the declaration of zero tolerance (May 2018) and President Tru…
A theoretical model for understanding relationship functioning in intercultural romantic couples
Intercultural romantic relationships have increased worldwide. Yet, there is a lack of empirical knowledge about intercultural couples. The studies that do suggest that intercultural couples have higher rates of conflict and long‐term instability, but most studies have measured intercultural couples using categorical responses of race/ethnicity, which limits theoretical insight to the interpersonal characteristics that make up high‐quality intima…
The Role of Family of Origin in Current Lifestyle Choices
Many Americans are in poor health. This is acute for racial/ethnic minorities compared with the Non-Hispanic white population. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze semistructured qualitative interviews to identify perceptions of family-of-origin lifestyle choices in same-race and interracial couples. Several central themes emerged from the data including influence of family-of-origin eating patterns, lack of family-of-origin importance …
Borderland parentocracy
Drawing on data collected during a 31-month critical qualitative study in the MX-US borderlands, the authors elucidate a positive and complex form of parentocracy unique to transfronterizo families. They demonstrate how parents bear their children in the US, move close to the border so that their children can more easily attend US schools and, in some cases, relinquish their parental rights to a guardian living in the US, to ensure educational an…
For Refugees, the Road to Employment in the United States Is Paved With Workable Uncertainties and Controversies
Drawing on data—including survey responses, interviews, documents, and participant observation—collected during a 26‐month ethnography of refugees in a northeastern U.S. city, I examine how recently arrived refugees create and access new employment opportunities. I utilize actor‐network theory ( ANT ) to examine refugees' linkages as emerging, temporal, and fluid. I empirically trace the drawing together of, and interaction among, individual refu…
When things come undone
This article focuses on the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the USA's broad sweeping federal education policy, in a persistently low-achieving school in which the majority of students are refugees and immigrants. Drawing on a 26-month ethnography, I reveal the ways in which a NCLB-guided school turnaround plan is enacted variably, especially for refugees. I utilize assemblage, a term often associated with actor network perspectives, to …
Constructing Gender
Drawing on data collected during a 26-month ethnographic study of refugees in a city in upstate New York, I examine the gendered and gendering training and work contexts with which refugee women engage. Utilizing the notion of assemblage, a term often associated with actor-network theory (ANT), I ask, among other questions, how do the gathered collages of texts, aims, histories, resources, knowledges, and practices that instantiate what we might …
Emergent Bilinguals
Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools—whom we refer to as "emergent bilinguals"—are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators, politicians, and the media through the manipulation and publication of school test scores, district data, and sta…
Global Scare Tactics and the Call for US Schools to Be Held Accountable
This article focuses on the response of educational leaders to No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) market-driven and sanctions-laden reforms as part of a political spectacle in which discourses link accountability and educational effectiveness to the advance of capitalism. Drawing on data collected during a multiyear ethnography of NCLB, this article examines leaders’ engaging with the textual products of NCLB and discursively supporting and challengin…
Resettling notions of social mobility
The global movement of people alters our understandings of social mobility. Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected since January 2011 and utilize the notion of assemblage to document and analyze how disparate people, their material objects, and discursive practices are brought together to render refugees as educable, productive, and employable in the United States. I examine the adaptations that result when livelihood paths and educational o…
The Theatre of Competing Globally
Reconceptualising diasporic intellectual networks
In this article, we explore how Chinese scholars in the USA recount their transnational collaborations and linkages. Guided by post-colonial theories and cultural studies of transnational academic mobility, we utilise in-depth interviews to resituate the scholars' experiences within a discourse of diasporic intellectual networks. We argue that their movement is not simply a transfer from one physical location to another, but rather that the movem…
Assembling and Dissembling
In this piece, the authors examine educational policy by focusing on the ways in which actors “play” or selectively follow, negotiate, and appropriate cultural instructions and rules. They outline a framework that situates assemblage, a notion utilized in actor-network theory, within the critical cultural study of policy. Treating policy assemblage as a dynamic cultural form, they argue, provides a way of revealing the complexities of sociomateri…
Constructing Gender
Drawing on data collected during a 26-month ethnographic study of refugees in a city in upstate New York, I examine the gendered and gendering training and work contexts with which refugee women engage. Utilizing the notion of assemblage, a term often associated with actor-network theory (ANT), I ask, among other questions, how do the gathered collages of texts, aims, histories, resources, knowledges, and practices that instantiate what we might …
Assembling and Dissembling
In this piece, the authors examine educational policy by focusing on the ways in which actors “play” or selectively follow, negotiate, and appropriate cultural instructions and rules. They outline a framework that situates assemblage, a notion utilized in actor-network theory, within the critical cultural study of policy. Treating policy assemblage as a dynamic cultural form, they argue, provides a way of revealing the complexities of sociomateri…
Resettling notions of social mobility
The global movement of people alters our understandings of social mobility. Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected since January 2011 and utilize the notion of assemblage to document and analyze how disparate people, their material objects, and discursive practices are brought together to render refugees as educable, productive, and employable in the United States. I examine the adaptations that result when livelihood paths and educational o…
Borderland parentocracy
Drawing on data collected during a 31-month critical qualitative study in the MX-US borderlands, the authors elucidate a positive and complex form of parentocracy unique to transfronterizo families. They demonstrate how parents bear their children in the US, move close to the border so that their children can more easily attend US schools and, in some cases, relinquish their parental rights to a guardian living in the US, to ensure educational an…
Principals, Power, and Policy
Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools that do not make adequate yearly progress must offer afterschool tutoring, entitled "Supplemental Educational Services" (SES). Drawing on 40 months of ethnographic research and utilizing actor-network theory, this article shows principals co-opting the SES provisions to do what they determine is required for their schools, often in defiance of NCLB. It demonstrates how, within an increasingly centralized…
Generating, comparing, manipulating, categorizing
This article ethnographically examines the ways in which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) links local practices to the centralized processing of data through its narrowing of procedures and measurements aimed at accountability. Framed by actor-network theory, it draws upon data consistently collected between June 2005 and October 2008, and then intermittently through October 2010, to consider the ways in which policy technologies, such as standardized…
The bans on teaching CRT and other ‘divisive concepts’ in America’s public schools
The Arizona state legislature has aimed to pass a series of bills banning those in schools from teaching topics associated with inclusion, social justice, and equity. Since 2020, the legislature has targeted teaching 'critical race theory' (CRT), often (mis)using the term to refer to any ideas related to systemic discrimination and racial inequality. The debates on the need to educate children about race and racism are ongoing, and school leaders…
Cultural Similarities and Differences in Relationship Goals in Intercultural Romantic Couples
Intercultural romantic relationships and multicultural families have increased in the United States and worldwide. Researchers have found that intercultural couples report high rates of conflict and relationship instability, which may be partly explained by differences between partners in relationship goals (e.g., how much intimacy is desired and how to approach conflict). Using data from 40 intercultural couples (N = 80), we test whether greater…
For Refugees, the Road to Employment in the United States Is Paved With Workable Uncertainties and Controversies
Drawing on data—including survey responses, interviews, documents, and participant observation—collected during a 26‐month ethnography of refugees in a northeastern U.S. city, I examine how recently arrived refugees create and access new employment opportunities. I utilize actor‐network theory ( ANT ) to examine refugees' linkages as emerging, temporal, and fluid. I empirically trace the drawing together of, and interaction among, individual refu…
Displacement, replacement, and fragmentation in order making
The US government is regulating the flow of people into the country. It aims to 'build the wall' between the US and Mexico, repeal NAFTA, alter immigration rules, and dramatically reduce refugee resettlement. However, an estimated 1.8 million refugees and 11 million undocumented immigrants already live in the US. Drawing on data collected in a 42-month ethnography in southern Arizona, we examine the 'divergence' of sovereignty, in which multiple,…
When things come undone
This article focuses on the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the USA's broad sweeping federal education policy, in a persistently low-achieving school in which the majority of students are refugees and immigrants. Drawing on a 26-month ethnography, I reveal the ways in which a NCLB-guided school turnaround plan is enacted variably, especially for refugees. I utilize assemblage, a term often associated with actor network perspectives, to …
Emergent Bilinguals
Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools—whom we refer to as "emergent bilinguals"—are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators, politicians, and the media through the manipulation and publication of school test scores, district data, and sta…
Reconceptualising diasporic intellectual networks
In this article, we explore how Chinese scholars in the USA recount their transnational collaborations and linkages. Guided by post-colonial theories and cultural studies of transnational academic mobility, we utilise in-depth interviews to resituate the scholars' experiences within a discourse of diasporic intellectual networks. We argue that their movement is not simply a transfer from one physical location to another, but rather that the movem…
Coloniality and Refugee Education in the United States
In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which the schooling of refugee youth in the United States reflects ongoing coloniality in education. Drawing on data collected in a case study, conducted between 2013 and 2016, as part of a larger ongoing ethnography of a Southwest United States District school's response to refugee students, we show how the enactment of policies, pedagogies, and practices within schools reinforce the government's control…
The Labeling and Positioning of Refugee Students and Their Refusal to be (Mis)Positioned
Around the world, refugees are portrayed as victims in need of humanitarian aid or alternatively, suspicious burdens on resettlement societies. These stereotypical portrayals position them as distinct from other migrants. However, in schools, students are homogenized. Here, we contribute to the fields of multicultural education and migration studies by analyzing the politics and complexities of labeling minoritized students in schools. Drawing on…
Global Scare Tactics and the Call for US Schools to Be Held Accountable
This article focuses on the response of educational leaders to No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) market-driven and sanctions-laden reforms as part of a political spectacle in which discourses link accountability and educational effectiveness to the advance of capitalism. Drawing on data collected during a multiyear ethnography of NCLB, this article examines leaders’ engaging with the textual products of NCLB and discursively supporting and challengin…
Appropriating Policy
In this ethnographic study, I investigate the ways in which students of Mexican descent who are designated as limited English proficient are “acquired” by particular social positions in a northern California high school. Focusing on two interrelated and reflexive phenomena in the high school—standardized testing for assessing English proficiency and instruction in English Language Development classes—I demonstrate how, through these institutional…
Fabricating and positioning refugees as workers in the United States
In this paper, which draws on two years of qualitative research, I examine the ways in which refugees are positioned and position themselves in job training programs and in their initial US jobs. I provide examples of how ‘factishes’, a combination of facts and fetishes, are fabricated and position the refugees, and those working with them, in discourses associated with migration. Moving from notions of humanitarian aid to economic utility, train…
Educational Anthropologists Respond to the 2024 US Presidential Election
This multivocal, multimedia commentary presents some educational anthropologists' responses to the 2024 US Presidential election and events immediately following. It follows the 2017 special issue entitled "Educational Anthropologists Respond to the 2016 US Presidential Election
Appropriating Policy
In this ethnographic study, I investigate the ways in which students of Mexican descent who are designated as limited English proficient are “acquired” by particular social positions in a northern California high school. Focusing on two interrelated and reflexive phenomena in the high school—standardized testing for assessing English proficiency and instruction in English Language Development classes—I demonstrate how, through these institutional…
Producing Success
Bilingual education policy as political spectacle
To examine the ways in which high schools in New York City attend to second language acquisition is to consider everyday actions in schools, government dealings, localized policy responses, and disparate discourses on bilingualism. It is to position the circumstances of learning and teaching English in an American high school within the problems encountered and produced when multiple educational policies collide in local settings, such as individ…
Generating, comparing, manipulating, categorizing
This article ethnographically examines the ways in which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) links local practices to the centralized processing of data through its narrowing of procedures and measurements aimed at accountability. Framed by actor-network theory, it draws upon data consistently collected between June 2005 and October 2008, and then intermittently through October 2010, to consider the ways in which policy technologies, such as standardized…
Principals, Power, and Policy
Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools that do not make adequate yearly progress must offer afterschool tutoring, entitled "Supplemental Educational Services" (SES). Drawing on 40 months of ethnographic research and utilizing actor-network theory, this article shows principals co-opting the SES provisions to do what they determine is required for their schools, often in defiance of NCLB. It demonstrates how, within an increasingly centralized…
Reconceptualising diasporic intellectual networks
In this article, we explore how Chinese scholars in the USA recount their transnational collaborations and linkages. Guided by post-colonial theories and cultural studies of transnational academic mobility, we utilise in-depth interviews to resituate the scholars' experiences within a discourse of diasporic intellectual networks. We argue that their movement is not simply a transfer from one physical location to another, but rather that the movem…
Assembling and Dissembling
In this piece, the authors examine educational policy by focusing on the ways in which actors “play” or selectively follow, negotiate, and appropriate cultural instructions and rules. They outline a framework that situates assemblage, a notion utilized in actor-network theory, within the critical cultural study of policy. Treating policy assemblage as a dynamic cultural form, they argue, provides a way of revealing the complexities of sociomateri…
Emergent Bilinguals
Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools—whom we refer to as "emergent bilinguals"—are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators, politicians, and the media through the manipulation and publication of school test scores, district data, and sta…
Global Scare Tactics and the Call for US Schools to Be Held Accountable
This article focuses on the response of educational leaders to No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) market-driven and sanctions-laden reforms as part of a political spectacle in which discourses link accountability and educational effectiveness to the advance of capitalism. Drawing on data collected during a multiyear ethnography of NCLB, this article examines leaders’ engaging with the textual products of NCLB and discursively supporting and challengin…
Resettling notions of social mobility
The global movement of people alters our understandings of social mobility. Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected since January 2011 and utilize the notion of assemblage to document and analyze how disparate people, their material objects, and discursive practices are brought together to render refugees as educable, productive, and employable in the United States. I examine the adaptations that result when livelihood paths and educational o…
The Theatre of Competing Globally
Constructing Gender
Drawing on data collected during a 26-month ethnographic study of refugees in a city in upstate New York, I examine the gendered and gendering training and work contexts with which refugee women engage. Utilizing the notion of assemblage, a term often associated with actor-network theory (ANT), I ask, among other questions, how do the gathered collages of texts, aims, histories, resources, knowledges, and practices that instantiate what we might …
When things come undone
This article focuses on the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the USA's broad sweeping federal education policy, in a persistently low-achieving school in which the majority of students are refugees and immigrants. Drawing on a 26-month ethnography, I reveal the ways in which a NCLB-guided school turnaround plan is enacted variably, especially for refugees. I utilize assemblage, a term often associated with actor network perspectives, to …
Borderland parentocracy
Drawing on data collected during a 31-month critical qualitative study in the MX-US borderlands, the authors elucidate a positive and complex form of parentocracy unique to transfronterizo families. They demonstrate how parents bear their children in the US, move close to the border so that their children can more easily attend US schools and, in some cases, relinquish their parental rights to a guardian living in the US, to ensure educational an…
For Refugees, the Road to Employment in the United States Is Paved With Workable Uncertainties and Controversies
Drawing on data—including survey responses, interviews, documents, and participant observation—collected during a 26‐month ethnography of refugees in a northeastern U.S. city, I examine how recently arrived refugees create and access new employment opportunities. I utilize actor‐network theory ( ANT ) to examine refugees' linkages as emerging, temporal, and fluid. I empirically trace the drawing together of, and interaction among, individual refu…
The Role of Family of Origin in Current Lifestyle Choices
Many Americans are in poor health. This is acute for racial/ethnic minorities compared with the Non-Hispanic white population. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze semistructured qualitative interviews to identify perceptions of family-of-origin lifestyle choices in same-race and interracial couples. Several central themes emerged from the data including influence of family-of-origin eating patterns, lack of family-of-origin importance …
Separating families, recuperating the “nation-as-family”
This study investigates the intersections of policy, affect, and the lives of migrant youth. We approach the Trump Administration’s contingent reversal of a “zero tolerance” family separation policy as an illustrative case for understanding how affect mediates policy-making processes. Combining Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) and affect studies, we analyze 184 print media texts between the declaration of zero tolerance (May 2018) and President Tru…
A theoretical model for understanding relationship functioning in intercultural romantic couples
Intercultural romantic relationships have increased worldwide. Yet, there is a lack of empirical knowledge about intercultural couples. The studies that do suggest that intercultural couples have higher rates of conflict and long‐term instability, but most studies have measured intercultural couples using categorical responses of race/ethnicity, which limits theoretical insight to the interpersonal characteristics that make up high‐quality intima…
Sovereignty, citizenship and educating refugees in the United States
Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected on refugee and other immigrant networks in Southern Arizona, a US–Mexico border region marked by incre…
Pushing the Boundaries
Purpose: In this study, we trace the work of refugee student–family mentors (mentors) in an Arizona school district who work across school–family boundaries. Utilizing boundary spanning theory, we examine how education leaders—teachers, school principals, assistant principals, and district administrators—work with the mentors. We document the interactions between the school leaders and the mentors and compare them with the interactions between th…
Displacement, replacement, and fragmentation in order making
The US government is regulating the flow of people into the country. It aims to 'build the wall' between the US and Mexico, repeal NAFTA, alter immigration rules, and dramatically reduce refugee resettlement. However, an estimated 1.8 million refugees and 11 million undocumented immigrants already live in the US. Drawing on data collected in a 42-month ethnography in southern Arizona, we examine the 'divergence' of sovereignty, in which multiple,…
Cultural Similarities and Differences in Relationship Goals in Intercultural Romantic Couples
Intercultural romantic relationships and multicultural families have increased in the United States and worldwide. Researchers have found that intercultural couples report high rates of conflict and relationship instability, which may be partly explained by differences between partners in relationship goals (e.g., how much intimacy is desired and how to approach conflict). Using data from 40 intercultural couples (N = 80), we test whether greater…
Transworlding and translanguaging
The Labeling and Positioning of Refugee Students and Their Refusal to be (Mis)Positioned
Around the world, refugees are portrayed as victims in need of humanitarian aid or alternatively, suspicious burdens on resettlement societies. These stereotypical portrayals position them as distinct from other migrants. However, in schools, students are homogenized. Here, we contribute to the fields of multicultural education and migration studies by analyzing the politics and complexities of labeling minoritized students in schools. Drawing on…
The bans on teaching CRT and other ‘divisive concepts’ in America’s public schools
The Arizona state legislature has aimed to pass a series of bills banning those in schools from teaching topics associated with inclusion, social justice, and equity. Since 2020, the legislature has targeted teaching 'critical race theory' (CRT), often (mis)using the term to refer to any ideas related to systemic discrimination and racial inequality. The debates on the need to educate children about race and racism are ongoing, and school leaders…
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (18 works) · Pedagogy (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Refugee (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Psychology (10 works)