Identifying the Anthropological in a Mixed-Methods Study of Transnational Students in Mexican Schools

Biopolitical power and paradoxes in evaluation research with transnational migrant youth

“…Theorizing our interactions, we recognized that stakeholders’ anticipation of the future led to their concerns about migrant integrability, which manifested in stakeholders mimicking evaluator practices such as creating data sources. This was not only a methodological issue, but an ethical one if culturally responsive evaluators are considering how to center the voices of marginalized populations (Hamann et al, 2017). The future is about “organizing and relating people, things, and events to each other,” and in this sense, it allows individuals to think through intersecting histories with the present problems (Hultqvist, 2006: 21).…”

“…The rationale for this effort lies in the fact that evaluation practice and specific research on migrant newcomer belonging (Bajaj et al, 2017; Rodriguez, 2019) could benefit from more substantive theoretical reflexivity—for instance, questioning the assumptions of evaluative criteria and methods and the conditions which make evaluation a desired component of organizations, programs, policies, and so on (Hamann et al, 2017). We give weight to our reflexivity and problematization in an attempt to raise ethical questions about evaluative practice, given the reliance upon evaluation as part of educational policy and practice (Cousins and Ryan, 2009; Ryan, 2002).…”

Dispatches from Flyover Country: Four Appraisals of Impacts of Trump's Immigration Policy on Families, Schools, and Communities

“…For almost 15 years, Víctor Zúñiga, Juan Sánchez García (both of Monterrey, Mexico), and I have formed a binational team studying children in Mexican schools with prior experience in U.S. schools (see, for example, Hamann et al ; Zúñiga and Hamann ; Zúñiga et al ). It is from this work that I remember a February 2010 visit to a rural school in the Sierra Mixteca, 200 miles southeast of Mexico City, where I met a sister and brother who both had been born in Chicago but were now living with their grandparents in rural Mexico (Hamann, Zúniga, and Sánchez García in press ).…”