RESEARCH
GLOBALIZING THE LOCAL—HOW GLOBAL IDEAS ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE TRANSLATED TO LOCAL CONTEXTS (Co-Principal Investigators: Peggy Levitt, Dept. of Sociology, Wellesley College and Sally Merry, Dept. of Anthropology, New York University. Funded by The National Science Foundation).
This project explores how global ideas about women's rights are used locally. Are they reinterpreted in the vernacular so they fit with local conceptions of justice or are they based on assumptions about justice and personhood rooted in the transnational human rights system? What does the encounter between the top-down introduction of human rights and the bottom-up mobilization of these concepts actually look like? This study examined women’s rights organizations in Peru, China, India, and the United States to answer these questions.
COMPARING SPIRITUAL AND OTHER FORMS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL: LESSONS FROM THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE (Co-Principal Investigators: Wendy Cadge, Dept. of Sociology, Brandeis University, Sara Curran, Dept. of Sociology, University of Washington, and Peggy Levitt, Dept. of Sociology, Wellesley College, Funded by the Metanexus Foundation).
This project examines three small cities (Portland, Maine: Cambodians and Somalis; Olympia, Washington: Mexicans and Vietnamese; and Danbury, Connecticut: Portuguese and Brazilian) to explore how spiritual capital, in comparison to other forms of social capital, influences immigrants’ economic, social, and political integration and continued homeland attachments. We consider how religiously based organizations, in comparison to secular organizations, shape the reception and integration of immigrants. We also examine how immigrants’ religious beliefs, practices, networks, and organizations influence how they develop relationships in these cities, their home countries, and/or in some combination of the two.
This project will enable us to disentangle spiritual capital from other forms of social capital—both conceptually and empirically—and evaluate its relative effectiveness for understanding immigrants’ adaptation, incorporation, and long-term transnational practices, and better understand the conditions under which spiritual capital successfully promotes immigrant incorporation and enduring transnational participation.
REINVENTING GOD AND CREATING CITIZENS: RELIGION AND POLITICS AMONG THE CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND BEYOND (Co-Principal Investigators: Peggy Levitt and Joseph Swingle, Dept. of Sociology, Wellesley College and Father Bryan Hehir, Harvard University. Funded by The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University)
Recent events in Europe have highlighted the potentially volatile mix of second generation status, non-Christian religious affiliations, and social and economic marginalization. At the same time, youth from similar backgrounds use religion to make a place for themselves in Western societies. They increasingly turn to “inherited religion” as their primary source of identity, hearing it not as a call to violence but as a channel through which to integrate themselves into the mainstream. This project addresses two interrelated questions. First, what is it about the intersection between religion, immigration, and society that make religious beliefs and practices serve as a pathway to political participation for some and as a political pathway of its own for others? Second, are faiths that people increasingly assume to be antithetical to deeply-held American and European values—such as democracy and gender equality—truly that incompatible with the West?
We answer these questions through two sets of activities. The first project studies the relationship between religious life and civic and political activism among Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Evangelical Christian college students in the greater Boston Metropolitan area. We compare the activities and beliefs of students who join “ethnic” organizations with students who participate in explicitly religious groups. We also study the relationship between local student organizations with their national and transnational counterparts.
The second project involves a working group of scholars who look at these issues comparatively. Because religious life is multi-sited and multi-layered, to understand the relationship between religion and politics, we need to look beyond individual beliefs and practices and take other actors, levels, and sites of the transnational social field into account. The participants in this group ask how national management of church-state relations, citizenship, and ethnic and racial diversity shape local level religious practice among the children of immigrants. How does the gendering of citizenship and other laws shape patterns of participation and mobilization? What role do transnational religious movements and global values play in shaping second generation religious life? The members of this group come from Portugal, Italy, Spain, Norway, Israel, Canada, Singapore, Denmark, France, Ireland, and South Africa.
CULTURE, MIGRATION, AND DEVELOPMENT: RETHINKING THE CONNECTIONS (Co-Principal Investigators – Peggy Levitt, Dept. of Sociology, Wellesley College, Marco Martinelli and Jean-Michel Lefleur, University of Leuven, and Jennifer Holdaway, Social Science Research Council.
Most discussions about the relationship between migration and development overemphasize economics at the expense of culture. They generally stress economic over social remittances, assuming that if we get the market factors right, all else will follow. They also assume that poverty alleviation in sending and receiving communities are two separate goals when, in fact, they're inextricably linked. This project explores different ways of thinking about culture, migration, and development. Its goal is to highlight the many ways in which culture insinuates itself into development and to suggest how these insights can inform policies and programs. A second goal is to further study the idea of social remittances and their impact on sending country civic and political life.
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