I use qualitative methods and sociological lenses to shed light on the social, political, and geographic processes through which immigrant families become woven into – or excluded from – the fabric of their communities in the United States.
My book, Holding onto Home: How Immigrant Women Resist Displacement, explores how Latina immigrant women negotiate the dual contexts of a sanctuary city and a xenophobic national environment. I reveal how immigrant women use their motherhood as a foundation for resistance to both anti-immigrant policies and gentrification. This book is under advance contract with the University of California Press.
Another area of my research, in collaboration with Roberto Gonzales, examines how place and belonging intersect in the lives of undocumented young adults, with a particular focus on those who have received DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). This work uses a longitudinal approach to understand the growing significance of place for immigrants in the United States across the life course and will be the basis for a new, co-authored book project.
Additionally, I collaborate with colleagues at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development to examine 1) a predominantly immigrant city’s response to community mental health needs and 2) young residents’ perceptions of well-being. Using the model of a research-practice partnership, we work alongside city and school leaders to understand and support youth leadership and well-being.
In addition to my academic publications (see below), I have written blog posts for Contexts Magazine, ImmigrantEdNext, and Council for Contemporary Families about my research on immigrant families, place, and education.
Selected Publications
For a complete list of Referred Articles, Publications, Reviews, and Conference Presentations, see Sarah’s full CV.
-
Bruhn, S. (2022)
Abstract: Prior research documents the gendered inequalities Latina immigrants confront as they negotiate the realities of life in the United States, a hostile national context for immigrants. In response to these dynamics, this paper examines how Latina immigrant mothers negotiate their intersectional identities as mothers and immigrants within the contexts of a gentrifying sanctuary city and its schools and an anti-immigrant federal environment. Drawing on three years of participant-observation and 87 interviews with 40 Latina immigrant women, I argue that these women use the school district’s programmes as spaces to recognise and affirm their motherhood and immigranthood and mediate the impact of illegality through a process I conceptualise as intersectional recognition. The dynamics of intersectional recognition, and the gendered solidarity and advocacy it produces, are facilitated in part because the city situates itself as a welcoming place. Yet immigrant women abut the limits of this intersectional recognition and solidarity in the face of constrained socio-economic mobility, restrictive immigration policies and rising housing costs. This research sheds new light on how women navigate their intersectional identities as immigrants and mothers and the mechanisms that support and inhibit Latina immigrant women’s inclusion in their communities.
-
Bruhn, S. (2022)
Abstract: Before the pandemic, immigrant mothers from Latin America in the United States typically shouldered the weight of caregiving for children, maintained jobs, often in precarious work, and managed transnational care responsibilities. But as COVID-19 erupted across the globe, the combination of gendered roles and a collapsing economy ruptured the already fragile arrangement of childcare and paid labor for Latina immigrant mothers. In this article, I examine how school closures intersected with Latina women’s identities and social positions as immigrant mothers who suddenly confronted job loss, illness, and increased familial responsibilities. I show how Latina immigrant women renegotiated relationships to schooling, becoming teachers overnight in an unfamiliar system. Mothers shifted educational aspirations for their children to prioritize safety, as they managed increased stress and conflict while schools remained remote. I demonstrate how the breakdowns in care infrastructure forced mothers to rethink the elusive balance between paid labor and childcare, especially for those who were undocumented. Throughout, I explore how immigrant women’s intersecting identities left them vulnerable to structural racism and exclusionary immigration policies. Despite the multiple layers of struggle, women continued to support their children’s education and socio-emotional well-being, even in the face of multiple levels of gendered, racialized inequalities.
-
Bruhn, S. and Oliveira, G. (2022)
Objective: The authors examine how transnational caregiving for immigrant women encompasses a set of complex gendered relationships and roles as mothers and daughters across national borders.
Background: Scholars have explored transnational motherhood for women who migrate, often in search of employment, while their children remain in their nation of origin. Much of this research has focused on how migration transforms mother–child relationships. Intergenerational relationships between immigrant mothers and their own mothers, and the emotional and economic care that facilitates these ties, are often left out of the picture of transnational family life.
Methods: Through ethnographic work, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with 63 mothers from Latin America who migrated to the greater Boston metropolitan area. Additionally, the authors draw from extensive participant observation with mothers at home, school, and sites throughout their communities.
Results: The authors theorize how Latina immigrant women are at the center of a web of multidirectional carework as they negotiate intergenerational responsibilities as mothers and daughters. The women in the present study orient their decisions, paid labor, and child-rearing around sustaining transnational familial relationships across generations. As a result, they provide emotional and economic care in multiple directions, including maintaining relationships between children and grandchildren, even as they adapt to ruptures in receiving care from their own mothers.
Conclusion: The authors argue that despite the gendered labor this emotional and economic work entails, the immigrant mothers in the present study value their carework, which ultimately becomes a means for them to exert agency in the face of anti-immigrant policies and discourses.
-
Bruhn, S. (2020)
Background/Context: There has been growing attention to the disproportionate and harmful effects of school exclusion, including suspension and expulsion, on boys of color. Restorative justice may be one possibility for addressing these disparities. Yet the research on restorative justice in schools is nascent, and in particular, little is known about the role of school leaders in enacting restorative practices as a means to creating more equitable schools.
Focus of Study: By highlighting the work of school leaders, this study contributes to our collective understanding of how restorative justice can function as a meaningful alternative to school exclusion. The study explores how two leaders exercise leadership, build legitimacy, and develop relationships with teachers and students. It examines how these leaders make sense of their efforts to transform the school from a place reliant on traditional punitive mechanisms as a form of control to a restorative school culture.
Setting: The study took place at a charter school with campuses in two neighboring cities in the Northeast United States.
Research Design: This study uses portraiture, a methodology that emphasizes participants’ phenomenological perspectives and illuminates the complexity of goodness and success, making it well-aligned with the topic of this research. I gathered data through in-depth interviews with and observation of the two leaders at the center of the study, as well as interviews and observations of students and teachers.
Conclusions: Ultimately, the leaders exhibited restraint, persistence, and respect, qualities that served as the basis for meaningful relationships with students and teachers. In turn, these relationships were an important component of how the school sought to reduce suspension rates and narrow racial gaps in exclusionary punishments.
-
Bruhn, S. and Jimenez, R.L. (2020)
With its publication in 1983, A Nation at Risk condemned American schools and decried the future of education and democracy at large. The report offered a sensationalized portrayal of schools in decline and provoked a national conversation about the crisis of American education. That same year, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983), a sociologist of education, published The Good High School as an intentional response to the focus on school deficiencies that was, and remains, common in social science research. To document the full range of complexity, vulnerability, and goodness that she saw in high schools across the country, Lawrence-Lightfoot developed the tools for a new mode of qualitative inquiry, which she termed portraiture. In portraiture, rigorous scientific empiricism is complemented by careful attention to the aesthetics of communication for the purposes of deepening perception and expanding common frames of reference, goals that often push audiences to see and think about the world in new ways (Dixson, Chapman, & Hill, 2005; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Together, A Nation at Risk and The Good High School presented two contrasting narratives: one recorded the dismal failures of American schools, and the other illuminated the hopeful, if imperfect, work of teachers and principals.
-
Bruhn, S. & Gonzales, R.G. (2023) Social Sciences
Migration research often focuses on exclusionary laws and social processes and how they impact children and the families they are embedded within. While important, this focus on harmful social structures can obscure forms of creative agency that are also inherent to young people’s migration, even in the face of racialized immigration policies that erect barriers to integration. In this theoretical article, we contend that spaces of belonging, where connection, sustenance, and recognition are readily available, are equally essential to immigrant youth and families’ experiences of migration. We conceptualize how these spaces are constructed at the relational, community, and national level, demonstrating how place, including physical, legal, political, and cultural geographies, shape these multilayered opportunities for belonging. First, we demonstrate how place informs the relationships that young people form with each other, with their families, and with other adults, and how the care that can emerge from these relationships is a critical foundation for spaces of belonging. Second, we articulate the conditions that enable spaces of belonging at the community level by examining how the geographic features of neighborhoods and cities shape young people’s opportunities for agency and recognition beyond their immediate relationships. Finally, we address the national-level dynamics that foster spaces of belonging, while attending to the reality that migrant young people and their families often live transnational lives across nation-state borders. This paper offers new ways of understanding how place informs migrant youth and children’s sense of inclusion and agency, illuminating how spaces of belonging at the relational, community, and national level support their dignity and well-being.
FULL ARTICLE (open access)
