Untangling Complex Narratives

Priority

The Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration (CSERI) engages in socially conscious scholarship that addresses one of the most pressing concerns worldwide: the intersection of narratives surrounding ethnicity, race, and immigration. CSERI, the first center of its kind to address this intersection, supports collaboration and the formation of research networks at Penn and beyond—both nationally and internationally—and positions Penn as a leader in the progressive study of immigration and race.

CSERI, led by Chenoa Flippen, Associate Professor of Sociology, draws on the University’s expertise in the social sciences, as well as related fields in the humanities, design, business, medicine, and law. It supports undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research, encouraging collaboration across disciplines and providing an institutional home for research on today’s immigration challenges and opportunities and the future of ethnic and race relations. The Center hosts postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and interdisciplinary colloquia and workshops, attracting top researchers. Through these efforts, CSERI is also building a pipeline for underrepresented minority researchers in the field.

The world is constantly in movement, with hundreds of millions of people moving across borders—often as membership within borders is contested—around cleavages of race, ethnicity, and legal status. CSERI examines these issues around the globe while maintaining a national focus on how the intersection of race and immigration shape contemporary immigrant incorporation, racial and ethnic relations, and persisting patterns of inequality specifically within the U.S. 

Over the last several decades, the U.S. has been undergoing a rapid demographic shift, in large part due to immigration. American understandings of immigration, citizenship, and belonging revolve around two competing narratives: that of individuals coming to the U.S. by choice and working toward social, political, and economic incorporation over time, and that of forced or involuntary migration, centered on African-Americans, slavery, and the structural, legal, social, and cultural differences between “white” and “others.” CSERI looks to answer the key question of how the contemporary immigration experience plays out against the nation’s difficult history of race relations.