Why do some immigrants feel pressured to conform with certain norms? What does it mean to belong—culturally and legally? How does that change from one generation to next? And what does that tell us about the politics of race, nation, and culture?

In my current main project, I focus on people’s lived experiences of assimilationism—racialized pressures to conform with dominant cultural norms. I investigate immigrants’ experiences with cultural transmission (how foreign-born parents pass on cultural markers and practices, how children receive them), and how they are shaped by race in the United States and France. This project uses in-depth interviews with immigrant parents, their teenage children, and their teachers in the Chicago and Paris metropolitan areas.

But just because we expect nonwhite parents and children to conform to dominant cultural norms doesn’t mean that their conformity is rewarded. For instance, practices we usually consider as “cultural capital” may or may not translate into educational advantage for minoritized students. In France, I’ve investigated the under-examined racialized and gendered dimensions of cultural capital, using French Ministry panel data.

At the same time, I’m interested in how states and immigrants leverage legal citizenship to negotiate belonging. In other work, I’ve used ethnography, interview methods, and census and survey analysis to analyze naturalization practices among older immigrants in France. I’m publishing an article largely largely focused on parliamentary debates over citizenship law to intervene in current conversations on “reparative citizenship” for postcolonial populations.