Stephanie J. Nawyn

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Michigan State University

Women in the United States have made significant socioeconomic advances over the last generation. The second generation of post-1965 immigrants came of age during this "gender revolution." However, assimilation theories focus mainly on racial/ethnic trajectories. Do gendered trajectories between and within groups better capture mobility patterns? U...

There is a growing scholarly interest in human trafficking, particularly the trafficking of women and girls for the purposes of coerced sex work. However, the field is hindered by both inconsistent definitions of sex trafficking (some of which categorizes all sex work as trafficking) and unreliable methods for estimating the numbers of people who a...

Feminist concerns about the epistemological problems of quantitative methods have resulted in an underdevelopment of quantitative approaches that could contribute to existing intersectional theory. Further, feminist scholars commonly consider the effects of gender as it intersects with race or class, but relatively little of this research has inclu...

Purpose – The burgeoning literature on gender and immigration has largely abandoned atavistic conceptualizations of gender. Instead, migration scholars have integrated an understanding of gender that is relational, contextual, and mutually constitutive with migration. Most of this research has focused on the ways in which migration shapes gender re...

Refugees’ opportunities for third-country resettlement have always been limited, but in recent years resettlement opportunities have become scarce. Syrians who sought protection in Türkiye initially expected to either return to Syria or be resettled within several years, but now acknowledge that they must remain in Türkiye. The Turkish government p...

The scholarship on migration and climate change has been rapidly developed over recent decades, moving away from apocalyptic predictions of mass displacement toward more nuanced modeling of the complex relationships between climate change and migration. Unfortunately, much of that development has happened in parallel to the core of migration studie...

Background Skepticism about COVID-19’s existence or severity has spread as fast as the disease itself, and in some populations has been shown to undermine protective public health behaviors that can mitigate infection. For populations that are especially vulnerable to COVID spread and severity, such as refugees, COVID skepticism is particularly pro...

Digitalizing technologies are increasingly heralded by a range of powerful actors and some human rights organizations as appropriate and necessary tools for ‘managing migration’ and mitigating climate change. Yet, just as exclusionary and marginalizing discourses of “migration problems” serve to justify the digital surveillance of vulnerable and pr...

Existing scholarship hypothesizes a causal chain from climate change to resource availability constraints, to forced migration and conflict risks. Limited research, however, synthesizes findings about the efficacy of interventions to alleviate resources conflict in communities hosting climate migrants. This systematic literature review identified a...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, humanitarian NGOs have instituted safety protocols intended to reduce the risk of spreading infection during services to refugees. But those protocols are not always followed, and how staff attribute refugee non-adherence reveals underlying power dynamics in humanitarian assistance which can shape how they approach imp...

Existing research indicates that women’s careers are disadvantaged when they migrate for the purposes of a male partner’s career opportunities, but the mechanisms behind that pattern are not fully understood. In this paper, we fill that gap using data from interviews with 18 highly educated Turkish women who migrated to the US with their husbands t...

Within the scholarship on refugees and religion there is very little comparative work, and, like most studies of refugees and forced migration, much of what does exist focuses on refugees residing in developed countries. This makes Leonardo Schiocchet’s work important just on this basis alone. Schiocchet spent 24 months between the years 2006 and 2...

To provide services safely to refugees during the COVID-19 pandemic, humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have instituted public health safety protocols to mitigate the risk of spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, it can be difficult for people to adhere to protocols under the best of circumstances, and in situations of nested cri...

Stephanie Nawyn on Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers.

As universities grapple with institutional change that tackles gendered and sexual violence, feminist academic leadership is crucial to effecting that change. We use as a case example the Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen) at Michigan State University to explore the opportunities and limitations of feminist administrators leading campus m...

Research that explains health of Arab and Chaldean Americans relative to the health of non-Arab White Americans is limited but steadily increasing. This study considers whether socioeconomic status moderates the relationship between race/ethnicity and physical and mental health. Data come from a state representative sample of Arab and Chaldean Amer...

This article uses data from face-to-face interviews with recently resettled Burundian and Burmese refugees in Michigan to explore the concept of market citizenship. Market citizenship (Brodie 1997) is defined as the allocation of citizenship rights based on an individual's economic power and participation in the labour market. While refugees have l...

Racial stratification in immigrant earnings has been widely influential in theories of immigrant socioeconomic assimilation, but discussions of how racial stratification might differ by gender are underdeveloped. Segmented assimilation theory attempts to explain the underlying mechanisms that cause racial disparities, but it fails to incorporate ge...

This introduction describes the second of two issues of the International Journal of Sociology on “Migration in the Global South.” Existing research on migration through and into Global South countries points to some key similarities between migration in the Global South compared to the Global North that make South/North comparisons feasible. At th...

Turkey has recently transitioned from being largely a country of outmigration and transit migration to a country of destination for many of migrants seeking employment as well as refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Policy makers and advocates have stressed how vulnerable many of these irregular migrants and asylum seekers are to human traff...

There are more people migrating from one country to another within the Global South than there are people moving from the Global South to the Global North. Yet most theoretical and methodological development, as well as most identified empirical patterns, within the field of migration studies relies on research conducted on South-to-North migration...

The aim of this study was to examine how acculturation, measured as years in the U.S., generational status, and English language facility, predicts health behaviors (tobacco use, alcohol use, and exercise) and health status (self-reported health status, health disease, diabetes, asthma, and BMI) for foreign-born Arabs and Chaldeans in the Michigan....

This document provides guidance regarding significant issues emergent from the current climate change, population, agricultural, and land use and cover change literatures.

Turkey has long been a transit site for irregular migration, and policy makers and advocates have stressed the vulnerability of many of these irregular migrants to human trafficking. The Turkish government increased its anti-trafficking efforts in the early 2000s, but these efforts may in fact be increasing immigrants’ vulnerability to trafficking....

Evidence suggests that despite the aid from resettlement agencies, many refugees find the resettlement process extraordinarily stressful and have reported significant negative mental and physical health outcomes. The literature on refugee resettlement often focuses on the challenges that these individuals encounter in their new environment. However...

A wealth of evidence points to the positive outcomes experienced by immigrants who can speak the dominant language in a receiving country. But most scholarship treats language acquisition as a variable that affects labor market opportunities, whether conceptualized as human or social capital. We argue that analyzing language as a noneconomic resour...

Understanding how immigrants assimilate to the U.S. labor market over time is important, but measuring the true effect of time is difficult. We know little about the assimilation of African immigrants, a group that has recently begun to enter the US in large numbers. The African foreign-born are unique among US immigrants in their racial diversity,...

The current US refugee resettlement system reflects the US government's agenda of having refugees acquire quick employment with low state welfare dependence and minimal fiscal and cultural disruption to the receiving communities. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) assisting refugees hold broader goals for refugees, including feeling a sense...

Services designed to facilitate immigrant integration and civic-political engagement in the United States are highly privatized compared to those in Canada, where state funding provides the bulk of funding for immigrant needs, leading to a political context in which social welfare for immigrants is thin but opportunities to challenge state policies...

In approximately three decades, gender and migration scholarship has moved from a few studies that included women immigrants or included gender as a dichotomous variable to a burgeoning literature that has made significant contributions to understanding numerous aspects of the migration experience. The larger field of migration studies, however, ha...

Previous research suggests that social welfare assistance can fur- ther subordinate already disadvantaged recipients. Refugee re- settlement, essentially a social welfare program, offers a different perspective on how welfare assistance might exert social control. Using data gathered from 60 in-depth interviews with people working in resettlement a...

This article addresses the role faith-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play in refugee resettlement and how they are both different from and similar to secular resettlement NGOs. The author examines how faith-based and secular NGOs assist in the process of refugee resettlement in the United States. Data indicate that most faith-based rese...

The majority of organizations that resettle refugees in the United States are faith based. The religious affiliation of these organizations varies, from the large Jewish organizations that have been active in assisting refugees since the nineteenth century to the Protestant organizations who have come into resettlement within the past few decades....

While workplace sexual harassment has received a great deal of attention in both the popular media and scientific literature, less attention has been directed to the differential occurrence of sexual harassment among lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual men and women, and the relationships between these experiences and alcohol-related outcomes. Addi...

This study hypothesized that interpersonal workplace stressors involving sexual harassment and generalized workplace abuse are highly prevalent and significantly linked with mental health outcomes including symptomatic distress, the use and abuse of alcohol, and other drug use. Employees in 4 university occupational groups (faculty, student, cleric...

Contrapower sexual harassment occurs when the target of harassment possesses greater formal organizational power than the perpetrator. Traditional conceptualizations of power underlying sexual harassment have either focused on location within organizational hierarchies or sociocultural status differences between men and women. We suggest the utilit...