Doctoral Dissertation Research: Evidentiary Practices for Establishing Psychological Trauma in Asylum Claims

随着《联合国难民地位公约》145多个签署国对难民的法律定义达成一致，难民是一种“有充分理由对过去和未来的迫害感到恐惧的人”，承认恐惧、评估恐惧的合理性和核实恐惧的合理性一直是庇护法的核心。尽管研究人员一直关注移民法中对情绪的解释，但没有特别关注旨在区分法律上对迫害的恐惧和心理创伤的政策工具的开发。更好地理解是什么让一个人在法律面前感到恐惧，可以帮助美国努力颁布合理的法律实践，这些实践解释了将经验转化为法律和医学证据的复杂性。除了帮助对研究生进行实证、科学数据收集和分析方法的培训外，该项目还将通过向被投资寻找更有效的方法向公众传播有关法律实践的科学方法的组织广泛传播其研究结果，从而增进科学理解。该项目还将扩大历来在科学界代表性不足的群体的参与。该项目探讨了与创伤有关的医学和心理科学如何参与与庇护申请有关的证据程序。在12个月的社会法律和人种学背景下，难民高度集中(因此适当饱和，构成具有代表性的研究人群)，研究人员将检查整个庇护过程，观察政府官员、律师、寻求庇护者、医学专家证人和组织工作人员的日常活动。她将具体分析庇护采访中对恐惧的描述，法医报告中对恐惧的评估，以及庇护决定中的恐惧证据。将在一系列政府、法律和政府周边背景下，通过档案研究、访谈和参与者观察来收集数据。这项研究的结果将有助于推进法律文化、官僚机构和法律与医学相结合的政策实践的研究。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。

With establishment of an agreed-upon legal definition of refugee as a person with a “well-founded fear of past and future persecution,” recognizing fear, evaluating its plausibility and verifying its rationality has been at the core of asylum law in the more than 145 countries signatories of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Although researchers have been concerned with the interpretation of emotions in immigration law, no particular attention has been placed to the development of policy instruments that aim to differentiate legal fear of persecution from psychological trauma. A better understanding of what makes someone fearful in the eyes of the law can inform U.S. efforts to promulgate sound legal practices that accounts for the complexities of translating experiences into legal and medical evidence. In addition to contributing to the training of a graduate student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in discovering more effective methods for communicating science around legal practice to the public. The project would also broaden the participation of groups historically underrepresented in science. This project explores how medical and psychological science related to trauma is engaged in evidentiary proceedings related to asylum claims. During twelve months of a sociolegal and ethnographic context with a high concentration of refugees (and thus appropriately saturated to constitute a representative study population), the researcher will examine the entirety of asylum process, observing the day-to-day activities of government officials, attorneys, asylum seekers, medical expert witnesses, and organizational staff. She will specifically analyze narrations of fear in asylum interviews, evaluations of fear in medico-legal reports, and evidence of fear in asylum decisions. Data will be collected using archival research, interviews, and participant observation in a range of governmental, legal, and peri-governmental contexts. The findings of this research will help advance the study of legal culture, bureaucratic institutions, and policy practices where law and medicine meet.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.