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

随着对难民的商定法律的定义-“有充分理由担心过去和将来会受到迫害”的人-的确立，承认恐惧、评估其可承受性和核实其合理性已成为《联合国关于难民地位的公约》145个以上签署国庇护法的核心。虽然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的迫害恐惧和心理创伤的政策工具的制定。更好地了解是什么让一个人在法律的眼中感到恐惧，可以为美国颁布健全的法律的实践提供信息，这些实践解释了将经验转化为法律的和医学证据的复杂性。该项目除了有助于对研究生进行经验性科学数据收集和分析方法方面的培训外，还将通过向致力于寻找更有效方法向公众传播有关法律的实践的科学知识的组织广泛传播其研究结果，增进科学认识。该项目还将扩大历史上在科学领域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sociolegal和人种学背景下，难民高度集中（因此适当饱和，构成一个有代表性的研究人口），研究人员将审查整个庇护过程，观察政府官员的日常活动，律师，寻求庇护者，医学专家证人，和组织工作人员。她将具体分析庇护面试中的恐惧叙述，法医报告中的恐惧评估，以及庇护决定中的恐惧证据。数据将通过档案研究、访谈和参与者观察在一系列政府、法律的和政府周边环境中收集。这项研究的结果将有助于推进法律和医学相遇的法律的文化、官僚机构和政策实践的研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.