Doctoral Dissertation Research: Temporality and Changing Parameters of Citizenship

在当代世界，作为公民意味着什么？客工计划、难民身份和其他形式的受保护但临时的法律地位挑战了对国家归属感的传统期望。模棱两可的人群可能看起来像是从裂缝中掉了下来。这给政策制定者带来了问题，他们需要保护一个国家的主权，同时也要对经济和人道主义需求做出回应。对于社会科学家来说，这也可能是一个障碍，他们试图对人与地方之间不断变化的关系的动态产生新的理解。由该奖项资助的研究通过使用密集的人种学方法，从头开始建立对公民身份的新的实践和理论理解，从而应对这一难题的挑战。这项研究将由加州大学欧文分校人类学博士生詹妮弗·A·泽尔尼克进行，她的导师是埃莉安娜·金博士。重点人口将是柬埔寨血统的人，他们中的一些人是加利福尼亚州长滩的合法居民，他们中的一些人已经不情愿地重新安置回柬埔寨。这种居住地的变化使它们适合于研究国家归属的模糊性和这些模糊性的后果。这位研究人员将在这两个地点进行调查。她将特别关注社会人口统计、迁徙历史、官方和官僚接触以及家庭和社会网络。数据将通过参与者观察、访谈、亲属关系测绘和档案研究来收集。这项研究的结果将产生政策制定者和社会科学家理解当今世界公民身份的性质和限制所需的丰富的微观数据。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

What does it mean to be a citizen in the contemporary world? Guest worker programs, refugee status, and other forms of protected but temporary legal status challenge traditional expectations of national belonging. Ambiguous populations can appear to fall through the cracks. This creates problems for policy makers who need to protect a nation's sovereignty and also be responsive to economic and humanitarian demands. It can also be an obstacle for social scientists seeking to develop new understandings of the dynamics of changing relationships between people and places. The research funded by this award takes up the challenge of this difficult problem by using intensive ethnographic methods to build new practical and theoretical understandings of citizenship from the ground up. The research will be conducted by University of California, Irvine, anthropology doctoral candidate Jennifer A. Zelnick, who is supervised by Dr. Eleana Kim. The focal population will be people of Cambodian origin, some of whom are legally resident in Long Beach, California, and some of whom have been involuntarily relocated back to Cambodia. This shifting residency makes them appropriate for research on the ambiguities of national belonging and the consequences of these ambiguities. The researcher will conduct her investigation in both sites. She will pay particular attention to socio-demographics, movement histories, official and bureaucratic encounters, and family and social networks. Data will be collected through participant observation, interviews, kinship mapping, and archival research. Findings from this research will produce the rich, micro-level data needed by both policy makers and social scientists to understand the nature and limits of citizenship in the world today.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.