From the ground up
From the ground up
- April 13, 2016
- Chicano/Latino studies assistant professor teams up with her academic mentors from grad school to host conference on gender and migration
When Laura Enriquez was a grad student at UCLA, she began working in a burgeoning field of interdisciplinary research: gender and migration.
“It’s an area that’s really been understudied,” says Enriquez. “Scholars started to fill in the gaps in the 80s by looking at the experiences of women immigrants, and later the role of gender in migration processes.”
Enriquez’s mentors, Katherine Donato, a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt, and Donna Gabaccia, a professor of history now at the University of Toronto, were two of the field’s early founders. In 2011, they were selected by the Social Science Research Council to develop a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in this interdisciplinary field. The grant allowed the pair to bring 14 grad students along the research track with them – and Enriquez was one of them.
Enriquez reflects on this experience: “The fellowship came at a critical stage when all 14 of us were developing our dissertation proposals. The conversations during our fellowship meetings and since have really helped me, and really all of us, center gender in our research and be at the forefront of this field of study.”
Now an assistant professor in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies here at UCI, gender remains a critical piece of her research on undocumented young adults. And she’s continuing the push to make it a central part of the larger conversations about migration in a host of disciplines.
Check out Enriquez’s quick rundown on her move to UCI and current research projects: https://youtu.be/vid4ckZK4kU
In September, Enriquez received $7,000 from the American Sociological Association to host a research conference – which she did in February with the help of Donato and Cheryl Llewellyn, another one of the SSRC fellowship recipients who is now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Home departments and schools from each of the organizers’ respective campuses chipped in funding and Gabaccia headlined the two-day affair with a keynote on the past 25 years of work on a topic still pretty new to academia.
Twenty-two participants in disciplines ranging from sociology to history to public health came from across the U.S. and Canada to present. Their talks tied issues of gender and migration to family, institutional claims making, space, and well-being - highlighting the reach the field has achieved, says Enriquez. The second day of the conference allotted time for feedback on presented work. Those in attendance are now working to push their papers into publication with key field journals, possibly with the goal of a special issue focused solely on gender and migration.
“It’s really exciting getting to see something like this through from the ground up,” says Enriquez.
Learn more about her work: http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/lauraenriquez/
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