Position: Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics, JHU Department of Political Science

Chloe affiliation: Faculty Board Member

How has your affiliation with the Chloe Center, and the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship before it, shaped your intellectual trajectory? 

My primary area of study lies at the intersection of racism, immigration, and citizenship. And I have, since I was a graduate student, sought to broaden the study of racial politics through comparisons of cases not only in long-deemed multi-racial societies or traditional countries of immigration, but also in societies that are assumed to be racially and ethnically homogeneous.

Another way this affiliation has shaped my work is that I’m interested in understanding how race works in different contexts and how it’s made and remade over time and across space. So, my research in this area foregrounds the role of politics rather than individual behavior or inter-group relations in understanding the subjugation and mobilization of racialized populations, and I examine the intersections of racism, immigration, and citizenship, as well as gender and belonging, primarily through non-Western cases.

By extending the boundaries of how and where we study citizenship, migration, and racism, I’ve sought to reframe the central puzzles and decenter the field from Eurocentric frameworks through comparative analysis of understudied cases, especially in East Asia. I believe that this kind of comparative inter-disciplinary research helps us to broaden our comparative lens to better understand how racial hierarchies develop in diverse settings; how racial hierarchies shape migration patterns and responses to immigration; and how racial, colonial, and legal classifications interact in the articulation of citizenship policies and practices.