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Begin New Search Political Geography North America Publishing Institution Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

11. Life and Death on the US-Mexico Border

Author:
Michelle Nicholasen
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Ieva Jusionyte has always been drawn to tensions at the border. As a graduate student, she went right to the heart of the drug and human smuggling nexus of Puerto Iguazu, a town at the tri-border area of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, to research how the media reported on crime. While there, she developed a deep interest in the experiences of firefighters and rescue workers, and later, in the US, trained to become a certified emergency medical technician, paramedic, and wildland firefighter. Most recently, she embedded herself at the US-Mexico border for a year, using her technical skills to help first responders on both sides of the divide. She reasoned that firefighters and EMTs would face many of the human consequences of national security policy on a daily basis. In order to fully leverage her insights as an anthropologist, she felt she needed to participate. In Nogales, Arizona, she volunteered as an EMT with the suburban fire department, responding to 911 calls—whether it was for a wildfire or for a critically ill or wounded person. Across the border in Nogales, Mexico, she delivered first aid to injured migrants and deportees on a bench in a soup kitchen, which also served as a humanitarian and legal center. Her forthcoming book, Threshold: Emergency and Rescue on the U.S.-Mexico Border will bring together the experiences of the first responders and residents of the local border communities, to take stock of the real-life impact of US national security measures.
Topic:
Immigration, Culture, Borders, and Local
Political Geography:
United States, North America, and Mexico

12. Coming of Age, Setting a Goal

Author:
Meg Murphy
Publication Date:
04-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Hanna Amanuel knows something about dignity. Even as a child in the Bronx, she saw it in places others did not—the bravery of new immigrants; the potential in low-income grade schoolers of color who, like her, were often underestimated; and in her mother, a proud woman from the Horn of Africa. Amanuel will graduate in May. With her sharp intelligence, a Harvard degree and the future it implies might seem to have been a given; an accomplishment, yes, but not an unusual one. That is not the case. She got here because mentors of color drew her onto a path that included competitive private schools, role models, and the reassurance that she too could succeed.
Topic:
Education, Diversity, Higher Education, and Socioeconomics
Political Geography:
North America and Untied St

13. On Love and Metamorphosis

Author:
Meg Murphy
Publication Date:
04-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Andrea Ortiz went down to the Charles River on the afternoon that she—victoriously—submitted her senior thesis. There she was, a girl born in Mexico City, an immigrant raised in Miami, a bright light, the first in her family line to get to Harvard. Yet she felt a wave of sadness, and that, she reasoned, made no sense. So she sat by the river to think until it came to her: this was yearning. “You never accomplish anything alone. I was feeling the absence of the people who were most influential in getting me to this point,” she said later. “I wished they could be here too.” Her grandmother is one of those people. She is a woman who created her own philosophy and humanities class in Mexico City for people, like herself at the time, without access to a college education. Later in rural Comitán de Dominguez, where Ortiz spent childhood summers, her grandmother mail-ordered hundreds of books. The family home became an informal library for rural housewives.
Topic:
Poverty, Social Services, Community, and Housing
Political Geography:
United States and North America

14. Cross-National Responses to Discrimination: A Q&A with Michèle Lamont

Author:
Michelle Nicholasen
Publication Date:
10-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Racism and discrimination are daily realities for members of marginalized groups. But what does it look like at the ground level, and how do individuals from various groups and countries respond to such experiences? Drawing on more than 400 in-depth interviews with middle class and working class men and women residing in the multi-ethnic suburbs of New York, Rio, and Tel Aviv, and representing five different racial “groups,” a team of sociologists examine how people deal with and make sense of the various forms of exclusion that are ever present in their lives.
Topic:
Race, Women, Discrimination, and Marginalization
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, Israel, Brazil, South America, and North America

15. he World That Awaits President-Elect Trump

Author:
Michelle Nicholasen
Publication Date:
11-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
During the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump claimed he had more foreign policy experience than any of the GOP contenders. In fact, he has traveled widely to meet with presidents, prime ministers, financiers, and developers over the past decade as part of his highly profitable business of licensing the Trump name to large real estate developments around the world. On the campaign trail, Trump’s provocative statements about foreign policy have become part of the public record. From pressuring NAFTA members to bombing ISIS, his pledges have caused a stir in the arena of foreign relations. Publicly, candidate Trump threatened to close borders to Mexicans, slap tariffs on Chinese goods, restrict Muslims in the United States, among other vows. Without a record of public service to draw on, it is difficult to know how these declarations might translate into a Trump foreign policy. To understand what lies ahead for the new president, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs asked its Faculty Associates in international relations to comment on the challenges and opportunities that await in five regions of the world: Africa, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Latin America, Europe, and China.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Elections, ISIS, and NAFTA
Political Geography:
Africa, United States, China, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and North America

16. Negotiating Economic Transitions in Liberizing Polities

Author:
Frances Hagopian
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
How do governments struggling to consolidate new democracies enact effective stabilization and adjustment policies, reform the public sector, and deregulate markets? And what has been the impact of economic liberalization on political institutions and systems of political representation? Treating economic and political transitions as mutually interdependent, this paper couples these questions to suggest a reformulation of the conventional wisdom about how economic liberalization proceeds and how political interests are determined. It challenges the assumption that neoliberal reform is most readily achieved in liberalizing polities when visionary political leaders surrounded by coherent economic teams with comprehensive programs in place act with a wide margin of autonomy from society. It also questions the contention that structures of political representation are the outgrowth of either economic organization or the product of state engineering. The paper makes two arguments. Its central argument is that economic reform is accomplished most readily when government reformers, acting through available clientelistic, corporatist, and party-based networks of mediation, negotiate the compliance of public and private sector representatives of social actors for the introduction of market-oriented reforms. They trade public resources or legislation favoring the representational status of political or social actors in the present for the agreement of those actors to accept diminished state resources for their organizations or constituents in the future. The use of specific networks of negotiation, moreover, influences the design of liberalization policies and helps to account for national differences in the pace and sequence of economic reform measures. The paper's second argument is that those systems of political representation that are strengthened as a result of the temporary advantages that accrue to them during the process of state retreat will endure even when they are incompatible with economic liberalism. This is so because the politicians and group leaders who manage these networks have the opportunity to design institutions that will allow them to accommodate themselves and adapt their power bases to economies in which the market plays a larger role.
Topic:
Economics and Political Economy
Political Geography:
South America, Latin America, Central America, and North America