Patricia EhrkampUniversity of Kentucky | UKY · Department of Geography
Patricia Ehrkamp
PhD
About
37
Publications
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1,489
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Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (37)
Although it has rarely been addressed as such, the regulation of disability within migration governance is a geopolitical issue. This article examines how refugee resettlement intersects with ablenationalism, an ideology that treats disability as exceptional, thereby shoring up the exclusionary terms of citizenship. Drawing on findings from our mul...
How do the lost futures of forced displacement converge with the impasse of being resettled to a “post-future” society such as the U.S.? Based on interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 with resettlement agents, service providers and Iraqis resettled in the U.S., we argue that the condemnation of “expectations” (that is, realistic hope) coupled...
Trauma does not have a single definition. Within Western paradigms, across humanities and social sciences, it has largely been characterized through temporal and spatial dislocation. Critical studies of trauma, however, suggest that such framings of rupture, catastrophe, and mass displacement can obscure longer term and structural forms of violence...
This third and final report on geographies of migration highlights the complexities of international migration through the two related processes of transit and transnationalism. Examining spaces of transit and transnationalism complicates notions that migration is a straightforward movement. The report first turns to transit migration in order to e...
In this paper we map out what we are calling a “geopolitics of trauma” by examining the role of trauma in transnational refugee regimes and the individualisation of geopolitical relations through mental health diagnosis and service provision. Focusing on one site of entry into the international regime of refugee administration, we present findings...
This second report on geographies of migration examines scholarship on the racial-spatial politics of immigration in the Global North, which have emerged as important issues in the context of rising nativism, the criminalization of immigrants, and the racist exclusion of immigrants from polities. The report first highlights research that has reveal...
Policing the borders of church and societal membership: immigration and faith-based communities in the US
South. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper examines processes of border crossing and border policing
within churches engaged in immigrant-outreach in the US South. Based on interviews with pastors and on
focus groups with immigrant and...
Recent scholarship has declared multiculturalism to be in retreat, yet multiculturalist discourses and practices remain salient in many realms of social reproduction. This paper explores multiculturalism in predominantly white churches in the U.S. South, a region that has seen significant demographic transformations due to immigration. Church outre...
This first report on Geographies of Migration primarily centers on refugees. I first summarize some of the
debates about categories scholars use to describe people who move across space. The article then discusses three prominent themes in geographic research on refugees, turning first to the securitization of migration, its spatial and territorial...
This article examines articulations of merit and deservingness in relation to immigrants in the US South. In a context of pronounced anti-immigrant sentiment, scholars have rightfully focused on state practices that marginalize immigrants. Yet xenophobia and exclusion are but one set of responses to immigrants. Societies also construct immigrants a...
This chapter examines the debates surrounding citizenship, focusing the discussion on rights and political community as they are unevenly spread and enacted across space. It emphasizes the importance of finding new vocabularies to understand practices of citizenship and political subjectivity. The chapter begins with an outline of conceptions of ci...
Cottrell, C., Nagel, C., & Ehrkamp, P. (2015). Changing geographies of immigration and religion in the US South. In S. D. Brunn (Ed.), The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics. Springer Science+Business Media.
This chapter examines the internal workings of faith communities in the U.S. South and how they are deeply enmeshed in every-day productions and negotiations of societal membership, citizenship rights, and immigrant integration. We begin with a brief overview of recent immigration and the ways it has complicated the region’s social and political la...
by Patricia Ehrkamp
This article examines the limits of welcome that Christian communities of faith in the U.S. South extend to recent immigrants. We argue that churches are political spaces in which pastors and lay members weigh faith-based conceptions of hospitality against law-and-order discourses, and in which notions of universal membership c...
Feminist thought roams through many topics, philosophies, and cultures, but perhaps one connection between these is paramount: feminist thought has concerned itself with questions of power. "Feminist" insinuates a confrontation of patriarchal power and asks how differently ordered institutions, material and natural resource allocation, symbolic mea...
This paper introduces the concept of ‘ordinary’ to analyze citizenship’s complexities. Ordinary is often taken to mean standard or routine, but it also invokes order and authority. Conceptualizing citizenship as ordinary trains our attention on the ways in which the spatiality of laws and social norms are entwined with daily life. The idea of ordin...
This article considers the ways in which places of worship serve as sites of citizenship politics in immigrant-receiving liberal democracies. We approach citizenship in terms of the social practices and everyday spaces through which individuals and groups negotiate the terms of societal membership. Places of worship are both the objects of politica...
This article examines how younger migrant women from Turkey maneuver the public and private spaces of their everyday lives in a neighborhood in Germany, and how they challenge and affirm the patriarchal practices and gender norms that husbands, fathers, and older migrant women seek to impose within and outside private homes. Younger migrant women s...
This commentary responds to Jennifer Robinson's argument about internationalizing urban theory by focusing on the ways that connections across cities and space may be rethought to include non-academics and non-English speakers. I suggest that urban research may learn from other fields such as migration studies to enhance comparative methods. Collab...
This article examines how Muslim migrant women's sexuality is instrumentalised to erect gendered and cultural boundaries of citizenship and liberal democracy in Germany. German newspaper articles on forced marriages and honour killings for a period of 10 years (1998–2008) are analysed to show how constructions of social, religious and spatial diffe...
In this paper I examine the relationship between masculinities, public space and race in the context of Duisburg-Marxloh, an immigrant neighborhood in Germany. I propose that young Turkish and Kurdish men enact masculinities in relation to young Turkish women, Turkish and Kurdish political groups, and German residents, which shapes public neighborh...
Recent academic debates on transnationalism, immigration, and citizenship have largely ignored migrants’ perspectives on citizenship. On the basis of ethnographic research in Germany and the United States between 1998 and 2001, we examine the values and meanings contemporary migrants assign to national citizenship and their citizenship practices. W...
In this paper I examine the ways in which politicians, media, and native residents formulate assimilation discourses—that is, expectations for immigrants to adapt to prevailing norms and cultures—and the effects that such discourses have on social relations in immigrant-receiving societies. Archival and ethnographic research in Germany illustrates...
This paper examines the ways that Turkish immigrants create places of belonging in a German city. I suggest that transnational ties enable immigrants to forge local attachments through the production of place. Drawing on a neighbourhood case-study of Duisburg-Marxloh, I show how immigrants' transnational ties and practices visibly transform their c...
In this paper, we propose a relational perspective on citizenship that captures the meanings and practices of citizenship, and their geographies in the contemporary period of accelerated and globalized movement of people across national boundaries. A relational perspective makes it possible to tease out both the complex articulations of state and c...
Projects
Project (1)
This is a collaborative research project with Dr. Jenna Loyd (UW-Milwaukee) and Dr. Anna Secor (University of Kentucky). The project examines how refugee resettlement practices and experiences rework the trauma of war and violence to create new geopolitical connections between Iraq and the United States. With over two million Iraqis displaced from their country by the recent war, Iraqis have been one of the top three refugee populations resettled in the U.S. in the past decade. Refugees are increasingly defined and cared for through a medical diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the role that the medicalization of trauma through the PTSD paradigm plays in refugee admission, resettlement, and well-being is not well known.
This project pursues three specific aims: 1) to determine the role that the PTSD paradigm plays in the overseas mental health screening and admission of Iraqi refugees; 2) to assess how the PTSD paradigm influences the administration of resettlement once refugees arrive in the U.S.; and 3) to examine how Iraqi refugees experience and interpret the process of resettlement and especially mental health screening, diagnosis, and treatment, and analyze how these experiences vary geographically and by age, gender, education, and time of resettlement.
