Doctoral Dissertation Research: Standardizing Persecution Narratives in US Asylum Adjudications

为NSF撰写的博士论文摘要：规范美国庇护裁决中的迫害叙述阿西勒姆构成了谈判国家国家利益与寻求保护个人人道主义权利之间紧张关系的核心舞台。该论文项目通过实证调查美国庇护申请的含义和处理程序的重大重新配置，审查了这些紧张局势的谈判方式。这项研究的贡献是双重的。首先，该项目将扩大对庇护裁决程序的了解。由于数据的限制，以前的研究得出了一种对庇护裁决的某种误导性的描述，认为这是内在的不一致。相比之下，通过分析新获得的数据，这项研究项目认为，官员们提出索赔的方式有相当大的一致性。国家要求申请者将他们的叙述与关于他们国家的冲突的标准化“知识”相结合。偏离这些标准化知识往往会遇到阻力。这表明，庇护裁决的一个关键解释阶段产生了迄今意想不到的一致性和一致性，对庇护改革产生了直接的政策影响。第二，该项目解决了关于正式承诺和遵守人道主义之间的差距的理论辩论。以往的研究通过关注人道主义和民族主义之间的相互关系来探讨这个问题。本研究超越了民族主义-人道主义二元论，揭示了人道主义是行政裁决制度的组织原则如何发挥作用。它表明，在庇护问题上遵守人道主义原则面临的主要挑战不仅仅是国家利益。相反，正是裁决过程个性化所固有的信息多样性，导致庇护官员依赖默认的概括，模糊了他们本应优先考虑的个别叙述。该研究项目解决了目前庇护文献中与庇护决策过程的核心阶段有关的空白，并通过提供第一个基于混合方法的报告来确定纯粹的信息过载和模糊的法律对组织决策的影响，说明审判员如何将个人的伤害证词转化为法律承认的标准化迫害规则。具体地说，它分析了通过提交国土安全部的信息自由请求获得的新的和全面的数据。这些数据包括1995财年至2015财年期间由美国避难办公室裁决的100多万起案件。这是第一个包括官员关于申请人申领基础的决定的全面信息的数据集。对这一数据的量化分析辅之以参与者对移民公司的观察以及对庇护官员和移民律师的采访。这项研究的结果将对庇护办公室的工作提供新的了解，这是该国最大的裁决系统之一，并有助于在不断变化的信息环境中对分类和分类过程的一般社会学理解。

Doctoral Dissertation Abstract for NSF: Standardizing Persecution Narratives in US Asylum AdjudicationsAsylum constitutes a core arena for negotiating tensions between the national interests of states and the humanitarian rights of the individuals seeking their protection. The dissertation project examines the ways in which these tensions are negotiated by investigating empirically a significant reconfiguration in the meaning and processing of asylum claims in the United States. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, the project will expand knowledge about the asylum adjudication process. Due to limitations of data, previous studies have yielded a somewhat misleading account of asylum adjudications as inherently inconsistent. In contrast, analyzing newly available data, this research project argues that there is considerable uniformity in how officers frame claims. Applicants are required by the state to align their narratives with the standardized "knowledge" of conflict formed about their country. Deviations from these standardized knowledge often meet resistance. This suggests that a key interpretative stage of asylum adjudications generates heretofore unexpected uniformity and consistency, with direct policy implications for asylum reform. Second, this project addresses theoretical debates concerning the gap between formal commitments to, and compliance with, humanitarianism. Previous studies have approached this question by focusing on the interrelations between humanitarianism and nationalism. This research goes beyond the nationalism-humanitarianism binary and reveals how humanitarianism functions are the organizing principle of an administrative adjudicatory regime. It suggests that the primary challenges of adhering to humanitarian principles in the context of asylum are not only national interests. Rather, it is the diversity of information inherent to the individuation of the adjudication process, which leads asylum officers to rely on default generalizations, obscuring the individual narratives they were supposed to prioritize. The research project addresses current gaps in asylum literature concerning a core stage of the asylum decision-making process, and sets to determine the impact of sheer information overload and ambiguous law, on organizational decision-making, by providing the first mixed method based account of how adjudicators translate individual testimonies of harm into the standardized rubrics of persecution recognized under law. Specifically, it analyzes new and comprehensive data, obtained by filing a Freedom of Information request from the Department of Homeland Security. The data consist of over one million cases adjudicated by the US asylum office between fiscal years 1995 and 2015. This is the first dataset to include such comprehensive information on officers' decisions about applicants' bases of claims. Quantitative analysis of this data is supplemented with participant observations at immigration firms and interviews with asylum officers and immigration attorneys. The findings of this study will shed new light on the workings of the asylum office, one of the largest adjudication systems in the country, and contribute to general sociological understandings of processes of classification and categorization in a constantly changing information environment.