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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 and civil rights. 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 Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture and Justice in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 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. More recent is 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. Skrentny's work has 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 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. Skrentny's current research focuses on contemporary policy politics and legal dilemmas, and in line with his directorship at CCIS, he is focusing on immigration in the US and the world. Details regarding Skrentny's work at CCIS can be found at the CCIS website. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, Skrentny is 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." Supported by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, he is now writing 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. It 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. As part of this project, he has published a series of articles on migration policy in East Asia and Europe. An article published in International Migration Review with Stephanie Chan (UCSD Sociology doctoral candidate), Denis Kim (Sogang University, South Korea) and Jon Fox (University of Bristol, Sociology) on how states in Asia and Europe implicitly define their national boundaries through their ethnic return migration laws and policies. This project shows how states in different regions effectively define the nation across borders by using ethnic preferences in immigration policy, allowing co-ethnic foreigners opportunities for visas or citizenship that are denied to foreigners with no ethnic/ancestral ties to the receiving state. These kinds of policies can be found in both Asia and Europe, but are practiced differently and have very different rationales. For example, Asian states use ethnic preference for economic goals, whereas the Europeans use it for a more expressive and romantic kind of nationalism. He extends this argument in an article with Dong-Hoon Seol, published in Ethnicities, on the implications of ethnic return migration for conceptions of nationhood. Focusing on the Korean case, the article shows the complex hierarchical structure of nations that is revealed when we examine how states and societies treat co-ethnic foreigners. With the support of the Social Science Research Council, Skrentny has another article with Seol recently published in International Migration Review that explains why there are so many migrant workers and refugees who settle in Europe and relatively few in industrialized East Asia. The comparison is especially interesting when we consider that Chinese migrants travel much farther to get to Europe, and to newer European countries of immigration with economies that are smaller than Japan or Korea. One finding this work seeks to explain is that there are more Chinese children in schools in Madrid than there are foreign children in school in all of South Korea. |
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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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