Stephen Fox

As an anthropologist, my research interests include Kurdish culture and history, the anthropology of policy, migration, the anthropology of the Middle East, identity negotiation, conflict and conflict negotiation, and the human impacts of climate change. Much of my work is concerned with the ways large political, legal, economic, and environmental forces are experienced in the everyday lives of individuals, families, and communities.

My research examines the complexities of human migration and the ways immigration and refugee policies shape the lives of refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants. I am particularly interested in how political divisions, legal classifications, bureaucratic systems, and public discourse influence experiences of migration, belonging, settlement, and identity. This includes attention not only to policies themselves, but also to the ways people encounter those policies through documents, interviews, waiting periods, administrative procedures, and interactions with state institutions.

My doctoral dissertation, Constructing Walls with Words: Kurdish Encounters with U.S. Immigration Policy, examines how the U.S. adjustment-of-status process is lived by Kurdish immigrants in Nashville, Tennessee, and what that process does to the lives organized around it. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in Nashville and Washington, D.C., the project follows the relationship between immigration policy as it is written, administered, discussed, and politically framed and immigration policy as it is experienced by the people whose lives are governed by it. The dissertation pays particular attention to paperwork, waiting, bureaucratic language, legal categories, institutional uncertainty, and the ways immigrants and their families make sense of and respond to administrative systems that often reduce complex lives to files, forms, classifications, and case histories.

I am also interested in the broader social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental conditions that influence migration. These include conflict, political instability, economic insecurity, environmental change, family and transnational relationships, and the unequal distribution of opportunity and security. Rather than treating migration as a single event, I approach it as an extended social process that begins before movement occurs and continues through displacement, resettlement, adaptation, and the negotiation of belonging.

A significant part of my work focuses on how migrants navigate complex legal and bureaucratic systems while simultaneously rebuilding lives, maintaining family and cultural connections, and negotiating identities across local, national, and transnational settings. I am especially interested in the relationship between the administrative categories through which governments understand migrants and the much more complicated lived realities of the people those categories are intended to describe and manage.

My broader research seeks to contribute to a more nuanced anthropological understanding of migration, policy, identity, and belonging. Through ethnographic research, I aim to make visible the human consequences of policy decisions and to contribute to discussions about how institutions can respond to migration in ways that are more intelligible, equitable, and attentive to human dignity.