My Research Interests

My research interests sit at the intersection of urban studies/planning, immigration, and social movements. I employ a highly interdisciplinary approach, drawing mostly from urban planning, sociology, and geography. At the most general level, I am interested in how cities incubate the activism of marginalized groups (e.g., undocumented immigrants, low-income workers and renters, LGBTQ communities, working-class African American residents, etc.). I address this broad issue through several concrete research questions:

How do cities incubate activism?

I have long been interested in how cities nurture and sustain activism. My interest in this issue began during research in the early 2000s on mobilizations of low-wage immigrant workers in Los Angeles. Drawing on urban geography and social movement literatures, I have argued that large cities facilitate the emergence of robust social movement networks. These networks often consist of strong and interdependent relations among diverse organizations. For instance, in Los Angeles, these networks have included immigrant nonprofit organizations, labor unions, faith-based organizations, university faculty, and legal advocacy organizations.

Strong place-based relations among various organizations generate important “relational assets” like trust, collective know-how, and common cognitive frames. These relational assets enhance activists’ capabilities to pool diverse yet complementary resources and deploy them in local, state, and national battles. When mature, these relations bolster the political power of activities in cities, transforming them into leading hubs of state, national, and transnational social movements.

How do city officials enact policies and plans to control contentious activism?

Local governments develop various mechanisms to control marginalized people and their social movement organizations. I have studied strategies of political control in cities as diverse as Pasadena, Los Angeles, Detroit, Amsterdam, and Paris. Rather than simply repress activists and their organizations, local government officials often make them into “partners” to assist in governing contentious marginalized communities. The aim is to pacify organizations and convert them into grassroots relays of governmental power.

How do activists shift beyond the local scale?

Cities incubate activism, but important policies may originate in state and federal-level institutions. The mismatch between the space of activism (cities) and the space of public policy (state and federal) motivates activists to shift scale from local to national-level social movements. My most recent book, The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship (2019), analyzes the transformation of the immigrant rights movement from small, local, and radical battles in the 1990s and 2000s into a massive, national, and highly professionalized movement in the 2010s. Local and grassroots political mobilizations provided more opportunities for directly impacted people to become engaged in politics and assume important leadership positions in their movements. However, local mobilizations made it challenging for local activists to address state and federal policies.

Scaling up to national-level politics enabled the movement to penetrate the federal arena, but it introduced new problems including the professionalization of leadership, the marginalization of undocumented immigrants from leadership, and the growing embrace of nationalist understandings of citizenship. The book concludes that scaling up introduced a significant trade-off: advocates could engage federal policies, but directly impacted activists were alienated from controlling their movement.

How do highly stigmatized groups create a legitimate political voice?

I have analyzed how highly stigmatized groups, like undocumented immigrants, overcome discursive and cultural barriers by constructing legitimating representations. To gain legitimacy in the public sphere, undocumented immigrant activists struggle to overcome the disqualifying stigma of illegality. To counter this stigma and enhance political legitimacy, activists sometimes generate representations that resonate with broad segments of the public. My research on stigma and political representations has been published in various journals, and my book The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (2013).