September 25, 2020
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Exploring Girl Child Empowerment and Immigration Enforcement Policies and Latinx Childhoods
Smruthi Bala Kannan is a PhD candidate in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research explores discourses of cleanliness and hygiene in and around schools. Centering adolescent children’s lived experiences of these discourses in Tamil Nadu, India, her work discusses ways in which ideas of modernity and childhood are negotiated through body, material, and space.
Smruthi Bala Kannan
"Say No to Plastics": Exploring Material Discourses of Schooling, Tamil Nadu, India
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Beginning January 1, 2019, the Tamil Nadu state government in India implemented a ban on the sale and consumption of some single-use disposable plastics such as plastic carry bags, cups, straws, and water-sachets. My paper engages with discourses circulated amongst 10-14-year-old school-going children regarding the use and disposal of plastics during July-Nov 2019 as the ban is being implemented and monitored throughout the state. I follow these discourses to explore the human-material interactions within and around the school in a context where plastics exist in ubiquitous use alongside anxieties surrounding the material. Following the social life of plastic in the schools, I trace the identities that the material takes in children’s discussions to ask: when does the material get articulated as ‘plastic’? What are the affordances of plastic that enable effacing or highlighting its materiality in school? I observe that the technical urgency of plastic-based pollution informs and emotes how the children relate to waste management in general and comment on each other’s relationship with litter. Further, the negotiations and critiques of ‘plastic’ presented by the students, parents, and shop-owners in the localities provide a nuanced understanding of the material environment of schooling.
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The Promise of ‘Empowerment’:
Adivasi Girl and the Residential Schools for
Indigenous Children in Central India.
This paper analyses the role of residential schools of Bastar, Central India, in historically and politically constructing the gendered subjectivities of indigenous girls. Hailed as a prime site of development for indigenous (Adivasi) subjectivities, the newly built residential schools or portacabins are the governmental response towards the decades long conflict between the state and local Adivasi populations that have struggled against the State oppressions and encroachments. On the one hand, this area continues to face violence in both spectacular forms and its everydayness (Sundar, 2006); on the other, the region has also received national and non-governmental attention in forms of multilateral development projects (Shah, 2019) that are targeted at indigenous girls. Portacabin for girls emerges as a critical site of intervention where the multilateral agencies contest each other to ‘empower’ these girls. In the paper, I situate residential schools as a key site to discern the figure of indigenous girls in the workings of education and development as a spatio-temporal project of the modern nation-state.
Rashmi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers, Camden. Her dissertation research seeks to explore the ways in which the figure of the indigenous girl in India emerges in the discursive convergence of violence and development. Focusing on the political and social constructions of indigenous childhoods, especially girlhoods of youth living amidst political violence in Central India, Rashmi is interested in locating the ways in which indigenous girls engage with the discourses on violence and development.
Rashmi Kumari
Mary Louise Mitsdarffer
Mary Louise Mitsdarffer is a current doctoral candidate in the department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden and 2020-21 American Public Health Association Maternal and Child Health fellow and David K. Sengstack fellow. Mary holds a Master’s in Public Health from the University of the Sciences and a Bachelors in Kinesiology from Temple University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Mary worked as a community health practitioner in the Mid-Atlantic region focusing on food access, nutrition education, and youth leadership development. She continues to foster her research interests and scholarship around public health, community-based health initiatives, and youth leadership as a graduate research assistant on the New Jersey Health Institute’s Next Generation Community Leaders grant.
Mary’s past research observed the built environment and youth interventions, specifically regarding urban gardening and active transport programs. Her current research interests include: U.S. policy and children’s health and well-being; health disparities and Latinx children; social capital; and quantitative methods. Mary’s dissertation, titled Understanding the Impacts of Federal and State Immigration Enforcement Policies on Latinx Children’s Educational and Health Outcomes in the United States, observes the impacts of federal, state, and local immigration enforcement policies on Latinx children’s health and schooling. In addition to her doctoral studies, Mary is an active leader in the Philadelphia community, and has served as board member and volunteer for nonprofits organizations throughout the region.
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Immigration Enforcement Policies and Latinx Childhoods
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The Latinx child population of the United States is large (32% of individuals under the age of 18), with a substantial portion living in the shadow of immigration enforcement policies. Such legislation grew significantly between 2003 and 2013. Latinx who live in areas with restrictive immigration enforcement policies report higher levels of stigma, stress, and discrimination, regardless of their immigration status and moderated only slightly by generational status (Almieda et al., 2016). In the proposed paper, I examine the effects of stress induced by the presence of local immigration enforcement policies on Latin Student’s English Language Arts (ELA) achievement.
Bellows (2019) was among the first to examine the relation of one immigration policy, the Secure Communities program, with Latinx children’s academic achievement assessed by standardized tests. Using data from the Stanford Educational Data Archive (SEDA), Bellows found that the activation of the Secure Communities program resulted in significant depressions in Latinx ELA and math achievement at a county level. My study extends Bellows’s work in several ways. First, I examine the effects of the Secure Communities program and an additional local immigration enforcement policy, state omnibus immigration laws (OILs), on academic achievement. Second, based on newly available SEDA data, I observe policy impacts over longer periods, from 2008-2009 through 2015-2016.
I have constructed county-year panel data to measure the impacts of the Secure Communities program and OILs on 3rd to 8th grade Latinx ELA achievement. I use difference-in-difference (DiD) models with county-year fixed effects and robust standard errors to estimate the impacts of federal-county partnerships and state immigration enforcement policies on this population. I run the same DiD estimation on non-Latinx subsamples as a robustness check. My subset population observes 1,650 counties.
I find that when OILs are present there is a significant depression in Latinx ELA scores. I observe similar decreases in Black and Asian students ELA scores. Further, I find a negative relationship between the presence of the Secure Communities program and Latinx ELA scores. My DiD models for non-latinx students indicate a similar trend in all children across my subsample when Secure Communities are active. Therefore, my findings are robust to the presence of OILs and not Secure Communities.
My findings support Bellows conclusion that heightened immigration enforcement policies lead to depressions in Latinx ELA achievement. However, I find that negative effects are situated within state level policy as opposed to mandatory federal-county partnerships. I hypothesize that the underlying mechanism of change is stress due to the activation of state level immigration policies.
I conclude that more studies need to be done to understand the causal relationship between immigration enforcement policies, protective movements (e.g. sanctuary cities), and Latinx achievement to better understand short and long term impacts on Latinx children’s academic achievement and their opportunities for lifetime success.