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John D. Skrentny |
John Skrentny received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University and a BA in Sociology and Philosophy from Indiana University. His research focuses on public policy, law and inequality, especially as they relate to immigration, civil rights, jobs and opportunity. Skrentny is Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at UC-San Diego. He has written two books and edited another on the historical development of laws and policies to protect the rights and opportunities of minorities in the US. These studies have included a wide variety of groups, including African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and white ethnics, as well as immigrants, the disabled, gays/lesbians and women of all races and ethnicities. This research has sought to bring a cultural approach to the fields of historical institutionalism and American political development. Starting with the premise that no policy is developed without the decisions of policy makers, Skrentny has focused his research on the worldviews and actions of policy-making elites, situating them in their historical, local and global contexts. Skrentny's books have included The Minority Rights Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), which won the Distinguished Book Award from the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award of the Organization of American Historians. The book was featured in author-meets-critics panels at meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Western Political Science Association. This work was also widely reviewed in academic journals, as well as The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, and The Nation. His first book, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture and Justice in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996), is a study of the development and politics of affirmative action in employment for African Americans. This book was featured in a author-meets-critics panel at the conference of the Social Science History Association, was reviewed in a wide variety of academic journals, as well as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Skrentny's scholarly articles have also appeared in a variety of leading academic journals in sociology, political science and law. These include American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Studies in American Political Development, Georgetown Law Journal and International Migration Review. He has also written for non-academic audiences in the US and abroad in such outlets as Chronicle of Higher Education, Le Monde diplomatique, San Diego Union-Tribune, New York Newsday, Jewish Daily Forward, The Hill, Talking Points Memo and CNN.com. He has received grants and fellowships from a variety of sources incliuding the Guggenheim Foundation, the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation and the Princeton University Center for Human Values. He has been active in professional societies for several disciplines including sociology, political science, history and law, reviews work and advises students in all of these fields and serves on the editorial board for the Oxford University Press book series on Contemporary American Political Development. Skrentny has been invited to present his research to departments of sociology, political science, and history; at schools of law and public policy; and at learding research universities in the US and abroad. He has presented work in the U.S. and Hungary, the United Kingdom, South Korea and France. He has also been a visiting professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Supported by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Skrentny is finishing a book to bring the civil rights story in the U.S. up to date and to take into account the current era of mass immigration. To be published by Princeton University Press, the book will examine the meaning of race in the workplace and the relevance, or lack of relevance, of civil rights law in regulating equal opportunity in employment. This study will have important implications for current civil rights law, the meaning of race in America, immigration, multiculturalism and equal opportunity. Work from this project was published in 2004 in Connecticut Law Review and another piece appeared in Du Bois Review in the spring 2007 issue. Much of Skrentny's current research focuses on the contemporary policy, politics and legal dilemmas of immigration, both in the US and the world. (Details regarding Skrentny's work at CCIS can be found at the CCIS website.) Along with staff from the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, Skrentny recently edited a multidisciplinary collection of articles for a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist (August 2012) entitled "Is Immigration Necessary? Work, Growth and the Future in the U.S. and Japan." His earlier guest editor stint with that journal was later expanded and published as an edited book, Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration and Civil Rights Options for America (University of Chicago Press, 2001). Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, Skrentny was part of a team of political scientists, led by Theda Skocpol and Larry Jacobs, who joined forces to analyze the politics of reform during the first two years of the presidency of Barack Obama. Skrentny's chapter on the politics of immigration reform, as well as the other chapters by the other team members, can be found at the Russell Sage Foundation's website devoted to the project, "Reaching for a New Deal." With Kevin Lewis, he has begun a new project, "Falling Behind, Moving Up or Moving Out? Worker Training in Science and Engineering," funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, that will explore they dynamics of demand for skilled workers, and in particular, how they manage to keep their skills current in the face of continual scientific and technological change. This is part of a larger project that seeks to explain several puzzles regarding science and engineering (sometimes called "STEM" for science, technology, engineering, math) workers. This workforce has been the subject of much policy and scholarly attention due to its links to innovation, jobs, and economic growth, and the widespread concerns that America is not producing enough homegrown talent and must compete with other nations for foreign talent. The goal is to use National Science Foundation data to show in unprecedented detail which fields are shedding workers and what the characteristics are of those who leave science and engineering occupations--as well as those who move into these jobs from other degree fields. In doing so, we hope to generate valuable knowledge for policy development, direct students to the most promising STEM fields, and better understand the dynamics of demand for highly-skilled immigrants. |
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| Books The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12988.ctl Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14180.ctl The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SKRMIN.html |
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