Stephanie Nawyn

Associate Professor and Co-director of Center for Gender in Global Context Michigan State University

  • East Lansing MI

Stephanie Nawyn specializes in migration and refugees, human trafficking and migrant labor exploitation.

Contact

Michigan State University

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Biography

Stephanie J. Nawyn is the Co-Director for Academic Programs at the Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen) and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology with expertise in gender and migration. Her work has primarily focused on refugee resettlement and protection, as well as the economic advancement of African voluntary migrants in the U.S. She is the co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies and Gender Through the Prism of Difference 6th ed (forthcoming). Her most recent journal articles appear in Journal of Refugees Studies, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, and Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Industry Expertise

Writing and Editing
Education/Learning

Areas of Expertise

Gender
Immigration
Refugees
Resettlement

Education

University of Southern California

Ph.D.

News

U.S. faith groups unite to help Afghanistan refugees after war

Los Angeles Times  online

2021-09-02

The effort by faith groups to help resettle them follows a long history of religious involvement in refugee policy, said Stephanie Nawyn, a sociologist at Michigan State University who focuses on refugee issues. Decades before the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program was created in 1980, faith organizations advocated for the resettlement of Jewish refugees during World War II. Religious groups also helped receive people who fled wars in Vietnam, the Balkans and elsewhere. Besides helping distribute government resources, the groups mobilize private assets such as donations and volunteers and work with other private entities to provide supplies and housing, Nawyn said.

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Stateside: Court orders release of detained Iraqis; new Detroit music; a case for year-round school

Michigan Radio  online

2018-11-20

Today on Stateside, a federal judge in Detroit has ordered the government to release more than 100 Iraqi nationals, many of them Chaldean Christians. They were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement nearly a year-and-a-half ago. We get reaction from a leader in Michigan's Chaldean-American community. Plus, religious communities have a long history of offering support and asylum to refugees, but that seems to be changing among some white Christians.

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Religion and refugees are deeply entwined in the US

The Conversation  online

2018-10-31

Robert Bowers lashed out at what he believed to be a Jewish plot to bring more refugees and asylum seekers to the U.S. before allegedly murdering 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Bowers’s claim that HIAS, a prominent Jewish humanitarian organization, was bringing migrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala northward to commit violence was false. But it is true that many religious communities in the U.S., including American Jews, have long supported refugees and asylum-seeking migrants who arrive in the U.S.

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Journal Articles

The Right to Belong (If You Can Afford It): Market-based Restrictions on Social Citizenship in Refugee Resettlement

Journal of Refugee Studies

2018

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 legal access to certain social rights, through the limitations of market citizenship, they are frequently denied access to those rights. Our data illustrates some ways in which that denial occurs, but also points to ways that refugees use family relations to circumnavigate the barriers to social citizenship that they frequently experience during the immediate resettlement period. Refugee families reassemble household configurations such that they increase the number of work-eligible household members, adjusting what we call the ‘neo-liberal citizenship ratio’. We argue that citizenship is broadly constrained by neo-liberalism, and that refugee families’ creative mobilization of familial and community relations are often the only avenue refugee households have to survive under neo-liberal constraints.

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Socioeconomic Status and the Physical and Mental Health of Arab and Chaldean Americans in Michigan

Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health

2018

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 Americans—the 2013 Michigan Behavioral Risk Factor Survey and the 2013 Michigan Arab/Chaldean Behavioral Risk Factor Survey (N = 12,837 adults with 536 Arab/Chaldean Americans).

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Gendered segmented assimilation: earnings trajectories of African immigrant women and men

Ethnic and Racial Studies

2017

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 gendered dynamics like occupational sex segregation and the feminization of particular labour flows. In this paper, we address that gap. Using data from the 1990 decennial census and the American Community Survey in 2009–11, we compare the earnings of black and white African migrants to US-born blacks and whites separately by gender. Our findings indicate that black African migrant women experience no racial disadvantage in their earnings, but black African migrant men do. Our results highlight the importance of examining racial differences in immigrant earnings interacting with gender.

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