Social Science

Committee Chair: Sharmila Rudrappa

Committee Members: Andrea Louie, Leland Saito

Winners:

Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and Welfare Reform, by Lynn Fujiwara

American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender Within the Ummah, by Jamillah Karim

Lynn Fujiawara’s Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and Welfare Reform, emerging from her feminist activist engagement with Asian immigrant communities in California, examines the gendered effects of President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform. She explains how the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 has reconstituted citizenship as a responsibility, thus deeming immigrants and refugees in need of assistance as threatening the privileges of American citizenship. While PRWORA has been recognized as antiblack, antipoor, and antiwomen, there has been no serious examination of its effects on Asian Americans. Fujiawara shows how Asian immigrant mothers are placed outside entitlement through being simultaneously deemed forever foreigners and model minorities who are inassimilable and who are “not-poor Asians,” and therefore welfare frauds. Through explaining how welfare-to-work requirements and welfare time limits affect individuals, Fujiawara shows how immigrant communities are terrorized on an everyday basis.

Through an insightful ethnography of the Atlanta and Chicago ummah, in American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender Within the Ummah, Jamillah Karim shows us how African American and South Asian American Muslim women negotiate ideals of community. While racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and classism clearly affect the women’s interactions with each other, they are forced to live out the ummah ideals of accommodating difference. Karim’s ethnography explains how principles of sisterhood, kindness, compassion, and social justice contribute to making cross-racial alliances when none might have existed before. What is especially striking about the book, for the committee, is that while much academic work on Muslim communities zeros in on Islamophobia in a transformed post-911 world, Karim instead has a different agenda. Through emphasizing the principles of Islamic religious traditions, she explains how American Muslim women live their lives in accordance with their religious worldview as they negotiate differences in race, class, and gendered expectations.