Research

Citizenship, migration and human rights.

Globalization, sustainability and economic justice.

Citizenship, Migration and Human Rights

This theme includes studies of citizenship and identity, the movement of labor, migration and immigration policies and practices, nationality and ethnocentrism, and conflicts and controversies involving human rights. Current and recent projects include:

Assistant Professor Monica Varsanyi and Karen Leong (Asian Pacific American Studies) are coordinating an ASU-wide research cluster on migration and belonging, funded by an internal grant from the Institute for Humanities Research. The research cluster brings together migration scholars from across the university to discuss their current research and develop new collaborative projects. In addition to Varsanyi, justice studies faculty members Charles Lee, H. L. T. Quan, Mary Romero and Marjorie Zatz are active participants.

A new research project, "The Police and Immigration: Understanding Local Law Enforcement Policies and Practices Across The United States," has been launched by Professor Marie Provine and Monica Varsanyi, with Scott Decker (criminology and criminal justice) and Paul Lewis (political science). The project explores potential conflicts between the norms of professional policing, which are generally oriented toward community policing goals, and growing political pressures to engage in local civil immigration enforcement. Building upon a national survey of police chiefs currently underway, they plan to submit a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation to conduct four in-depth case studies.

Justice and Social Inquiry Director Marjorie Zatz is re-engaging her earlier work on immigration with a new study of immigration, crime and justice. This research addresses the increasing vulnerability of immigrants to criminal victimization as a consequence of recently enacted legislation and voter referendums.

A third immigration project within Justice and Social Inquiry is being conducted by Professor Mary Romero, who is continuing her work on racial profiling, gendered labor and immigration, with an analysis of the Mothers Against Illegal Aliens campaign against Mexican immigrant women and their children.

Assistant Professor Charles Lee works on projects related to terrorism. Weaving a traveling narrative of terrorists, one of his new papers contends that to recognize suicide bombers as "citizens," rather than the predominant image of them as fanatics or nihilists actually constitutes the first critical step in ending terrorism.

Globalization, Sustainability and Economic Justice

Justice and Social Inquiry faculty are leaders nationally in studies of gender and work, privatization of water and other natural resources, energy and resource extraction, and globalization and economic inequality.

Justice and Social Inquiry faculty study various aspects of nonprofit organizations. Assistant Professor Vanna Gonzales is beginning a study of social efficacy and cultural competency among nonprofit human service providers in the Southwest. The first stage of this project, which involves surveying executive and program directors of human service organizations in Maricopa and Yuma counties, is funded by an award to Gonzales as a Nonprofit Academic Centers Council William Diaz Fellow. Drawing on her research of Italian social cooperatives, Gonzales also has an article appearing this winter in Imprese Sociale, Italy’s premier journal focusing on nonprofit organizations and a new book chapter entitled, "Social Enterprises, Institutional Capacity and Social Inclusion," in "Social Economy. Building Inclusive Economies" (2007), published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Professors Nancy Jurik, Gray Cavender and doctoral alumna Julie Cowgill (Oklahoma City University) are examining client resistance to staff controls in a microenterprise development program in their forthcoming article for the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Based on a case study of one microenterprise program from its inception through its maturation, they find that stereotyping and resocializing of clients were common in the program they studied. Clients used a variety of strategies to resist staff stereotypes and demand program modifications. Staff were responsive to these demands; but program changes over time reduced the opportunities for clients to collectively resist the oppressive features of this postwelfare reform program.

Assistant Professor LaDawn Haglund is completing a book manuscript on the institutional factors associated with ensuring social and economic rights in public good sectors, with a special focus on water. Haglund and economist Rimjhim Aggarawal (sustainability) are collaborating on a proposal designed to generate a more complex understanding of the underlying structural, cultural and systemic factors that shape water reform processes in Central America, India and South Africa.

Law, Policy and Social Change

Justice and Social Inquiry is ranked among the top law and society graduate programs nationally and is a founding member of the Law and Society Association’s Consortiums of Graduate and Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs.

Assistant Professor Vera Lopez has conducted a set of prevention studies involving teens, drugs and gangs. With Professor Nancy Jurik and graduate student Stacia Gilliard-Matthews, Lopez has also completed a paper that uses a social construction approach to examine delinquent girls’ drug procurement strategies within the context of their relationships with boys and older men.

Director Marjorie Zatz continues her theoretical and empirical work on conceptualizations of race, ethnicity and gender in juvenile and criminal court. With graduate student Hilary Smith and Nancy Rodríguez (criminology and criminal justice), Zatz has conducted a series of analyses of the impact of race, ethnicity, gender and family dysfunction on juvenile justice processing and decision making.

Professor Anne Schneider is undertaking a content analysis of the broader impact statements in nanotechnology grant proposals funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to assess what researchers say about NSF’s "Criterion 2." This adds to the review standards the requirement that researchers explain the broader collection impacts of their research. With her colleague, Helen Ingram, she is also continuing her work on social constructions and public policy, particularly focusing on the question of why those who are treated the worst by policy tend to participate the least. As a result, they find the policy production systems do not make the kinds of corrections expected by pluralist democratic theory.

Media, Technology and Culture

Justice and Social Inquiry faculty are experts in the area of media, technology and culture, and conduct research on print, television, internet media, studies of surveillance and security, gendered media images, internet technologies, international politics and medical informatics.

Professors Gray Cavender and Nancy Jurik have developed a series of articles analyzing the television hit series Prime Suspect, which portrays a strong woman lead character (Detective Chief Superintendent Jane Tennison of the London Metropolitan Police) in a traditionally male-dominated genre. They use Tennison’s role to illustrate their model of progressive moral fiction—media productions that acquaint viewers with the societal roots of social problems and allow them to understand the perspective of individuals who are socially marginalized. Cavender and Jurik’s latest publication on the series appears in the October issue of Feminist Criminology.

In another media-related research project, Regents’ Professor David Altheide continues to examine how news reports based on limited sources reflect the views of certain institutions and organizations, which, in turn, change public perceptions and discourse about social issues. Altheide has several publications that track how "fear" and "terrorism" have been joined in thousands of news reports. Other publications, co-authored with graduate alumnus Michael Coyle and graduate student Katie DeVriese, report how criminal justice phrases and terms, such as "smart on crime," "perps" and "junkies," have entered popular culture and are now used in a variety of contexts.

Now in the second year of their two-year project funded by the National Science Foundation, Assistant Professor Torin Monahan and Jill Fisher (women and gender studies) are investigating the implementation of radiofrequency identification (RFID) technologies in healthcare systems. Increasingly used in hospitals to track inventory, identify patients and manage personnel, RFID systems may be valuable but also may lend themselves to surveillance potentials. Exploring the effects of RFID technology on organizational dynamics, the study uses qualitative methods at six hospitals to gain insight into the use and effects of these technologies.

Social Identities and Communities

Scholarship on social identities and communities includes intersectional studies of gender, race, class and sexual orientation; youth, families and communities; gender, race and the law; racialized space and justice and urbanization.

Associate Professor Madelaine Adelman’s work in Israel counts among the first long-term ethnographic analyses of domestic violence outside the U.S., and serves as a rare example of social science research that considers the everyday lives of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. While data collection can be challenging during periods of heightened political violence, these historical circumstances proved critical to her findings. Political violence and militarism, she argues, fundamentally inform how domestic violence is defined, explained and organized against, or what Adelman calls, "the militarization of domestic violence." A further development from this research is the Democracy in the Middle East (DIME) project, in collaboration with Miriam Elman (political science). DIME received seed funding from the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict to host an international conference that resulted in, "Jerusalem Across the Disciplines," an edited volume. It asks how various academic disciplines shape our knowledge about Jerusalem and offers innovative contributions from a range of cross-disciplinary engagements with the contested city.