This dissertation includes three papers that examine the programs, policies, and contexts that explicitly or implicitly relate to food insecurity in the United States. Paper I estimates participation in social welfare programs across disability status and examines how access to participation differs by level of unmet food need in the household. Paper II estimates the causal effects of state minimum wage increases on household food security status across varying levels of wage increases and household characteristics. Paper III explores the relationship between food security status and metro-area classification, investigating how distributional differences in individual, household, and state-level characteristics across geographic location influence this relationship.

“The Politics of Abortion Care in Ohio” is based on 16-months (November 2021- February 2023) of ethnographic fieldwork and 47 semi-structured interviews conducted before and after the Dobbs Supreme Court decision (2022) overturning the right to abortion in the United States (US). Currently, 14 states have banned abortion and three have bans prior to six weeks of pregnancy. I assert that the criminalization of abortion care is a form of structural violence that leads to direct harm experienced by pregnant people. My dissertation strives to make significant contributions to theories of state-based violence with particular attention to reproductive governance, the anthropology of policy, and the politics of care. First, I develop my concept of reproductive gerrymandering, which names a particular phenomenon wherein the political power of voters who support reproductive healthcare access is suppressed across political party lines. It gives the false impression that the majority of residents in states that predominately elect Republican representatives want government elimination of abortion and related services. I argue that reproductive gerrymandering is a form of bureaucratic violence used to promote anti-abortion agendas, which then causes everyday structural harm to pregnant people. Second, building upon theories of agnotology, or the study of ignorance, I argue that “heartbeat” bans—legislation that advances medical misinformation—manipulates biomedical terms to imbue a particular social meaning to embryos at a very early stage of pregnancy. I explore how biomedical practices, in this case the use of ultrasound technology to detect a “heartbeat,” furthers the cultural production of ignorance around pregnancy and sends a strategic message about the beginnings of life. Third, I demonstrate how constant fluctuations in abortion policy shape temporalities of care in clinic settings. Finally, I reveal three overlooked dimensions of reproductive governance to better understand political control of reproductive bodies: administrative and regulatory, the spread of ignorance, and the political reconfiguring of reproductive time. Ultimately, I argue for the conceptual value of attending to temporalities of structural violence, and specifically the pace with which political violence unfolds.

This dissertation is motivated by a straightforward question about a drastic change to American politics: why has the process of staffing the circuit courts of appeals, once so agreeable and bipartisan, seemed to have descended into almost complete partisan bitterness? Across the entire time series, these are, after all, the same courts endowed with the same power of judicial review. And when the process of staffing them was harmonious, the courts were nevertheless deciding the fate of major, controversial policies of national importance---such as the New Deal in the 1930s and civil rights in the 1950s---just as they do today. Yes, many other aspects of American politics have changed through the decades. But what could possibly explain such a complete reversal of course? I argue that this change, toward divisiveness and partisan warfare, is actually about the judiciary itself and the substantive manner by which the nominees are thought of---namely, the entry of judicial ideology into the debate through the innovation of circuit judges being evaluated on ideological terms. While taken for granted as central today, any ideological assessment of circuit court nominees, and in particular viewing them as having a comprehensive judicial philosophy as opposed to just a position on singular pressing issue of the day, was almost nonexistent for generations. Its entry into the process was piecemeal and somewhat complicated, but it eventually came to dominate and irrevocably polarize the business of staffing the courts. I argue that this was the key factor that leaves us where we are today. Broadly speaking, I consider the contributions and particular strengths of my dissertation, relative to previous scholarship, to be threefold. First is my argument and accompanying analyses which put the crucial (and severely understudied) role of judicial ideology front and center. Second, I analyze the entire lifespan of the circuit courts, whereas the previous scholarship looks only at (often relatively brief) subsets of their history. As far as I know, this is the first study to systematically look at all circuit court nominations from the establishment of these courts in 1891 through the modern era. Third, I collect and analyze a great deal of new data. In particular I focus on systematically utilizing extensive archival resources and build two original data sets related to the Senate's public and private evaluation of judicial nominees; and while there is certainly a qualitative aspect to much of this research, I also synthesize and make sense of it with quantitative analysis. In chapter 1, I explain the puzzle motivating this research, elaborate my argument, and lay out the theoretical, methodological, and data collection contributions of this dissertation. I also review the literature and describe the three existing schools of thought. In chapter 2, I give an overview of the history of the circuit courts from their founding to the present. In this data-heavy chapter, I examine multiple metrics individually, and using several of these I build a robust composite score of divisiveness for each nominee ever made to the circuit courts, from 1891 through 2020. As far as I know this has never been done before. I find overwhelming evidence that the process has fundamentally changed and become more divisive. In chapter 3, I dig more deeply into the timing of this change, and begin to explore how and why it happened---and begin my attempt at demonstrating how the evaluation of judicial ideology is central to this change. To do this I examine a massive data source that has never been utilized: the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for all nominees. With both qualitative and quantitative analysis, I show that the evaluation of nominees has varied widely over time. Prior to 1979, nominees were evaluated almost exclusively based on their qualifications, with ideology examined only under special circumstances, which I explore in depth. In this time period, ideological scrutiny predicted a contentious confirmation process, providing evidence for my argument that ideological evaluation drove divisiveness. Also in this chapter, I analyze the post-1979 transition to the routine ideological evaluation that permanently altered the confirmation process. I find that Republicans and comprehensive judicial philosophies both played a key role. In chapter 4, I examine the senators' private evaluation of nominees, in part to serve as a check on the validity of my earlier data analysis and also to see if there is any difference between the senators' public and private goals in relation to the judiciary. To do this, I build an original data set of over 1000 internal letters and memoranda from senators, by searching the archival records of nearly every president since Benjamin Harrison as well as over 150 senators. Studying this material qualitatively and quantitatively, the findings here largely align with the analysis of the public committee hearings: for much of history senators were concerned mainly about qualifications, with ideological concern rare and under special circumstances, but eventually ideology came to be the predominant concern which ended the consensual and placid process. This immense historical record also brings to light additional senatorial goals, such as ensuring residents of their own state as well as personal friends obtain judicial appointments. In chapter 5, I focus in on the post-1979 era and I find that the more ideologically distant a nominee is from the Senate, the more divisive the confirmation process is. This provides evidence that the process is defined by ideology related to the nominees, not garden variety polarization of the system. In chapter 6, I conclude, trying to synthesize all of my findings as well as offer some thoughts on areas of future research.

Despite decades of research on school effectiveness and improvement, we continue to struggle to support school improvement at scale. I suggest this is in part due to methodological and theoretical limitations of the extant literature: While there is a growing consensus that leaders should “diagnose” school improvement needs to devise contextually appropriate improvement strategies, no empirical guidance exists to support how to make such diagnoses or which strategies to employ given contextual variation. I address this gap through a mixed methods analysis of how schools with varying improvement capacity at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City adapted and learned in response to the pandemic’s challenges. While the COVID-19 pandemic has presented school and district leaders with a more extreme context in which to confront a central problem that has confounded educational researchers and practitioners for decades: How can school and district leaders build the improvement capacity that will enable them to continuously meet the needs of all students in all schools? There are five key findings of the present study. First, using Latent Transition Analysis (LTA), I identified six statistically significant subgroups among all New York City elementary, middle, and high schools serving students in grades 3-8 (n=1225) based on teachers’ perceptions of school improvement capacity. I further described the relationship between this typology and school contextual covariates and student outcomes, depicting the types of schools that are classified in each subgroup and the relationship between subgroup classification and academic outcomes. Second, I demonstrated how teachers’ perceptions of school capacity varied from 2017-2019 and further identified a differential relationship between principal turnover and school improvement trajectories. Third, I found strong qualitative support for the quantitative typology, describing alignment between teachers’ and leaders’ lived experiences of school improvement and change and the quantitative typology and trajectories with one key exception: those schools that experienced a leadership transition after 2019 were most likely to have experienced dramatic change. Fourth, I found teachers’ and leaders’ perceptions of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic varied, in part, as a function of their improvement capacity at the onset of the pandemic. Respondents in schools from high-capacity subgroups were more likely to view pandemic challenges as easy to overcome, while respondents in schools with minimal improvement capacity were more likely to be overwhelmed by the multiple, compounding challenges they faced during the pandemic. Finally, I found key differences in the strategies schools employed to adapt and learn in response to these challenges, which again, varied based on their improvement capacity when the pandemic hit. Together, these findings provide support for a theory of differentiated school improvement.

This study examines the various ways that Central American migrants traversing Mexico’s southern border interpret, negotiate, and resist conditions of immobilization imposed by state refugee policy and other institutional impediments to northbound movement. My findings are informed by 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tapachula, Chiapas, followed by an additional six, non-consecutive weeks in various sites of transit across Mexico as a Human Rights Observer in the migrant caravans of 2017 and 2018. Since 2011, as a result of increasing rates of violence, flows of Central American women, youth, and families across Mexico’s southern border have risen substantially. In efforts to curb northbound movement, the US has exerted significant pressure for the Mexican government to assume a greater role in the retention, organization, and deterrence of prospective refugee populations, resulting in the temporary resettlement along the southern border of thousands of migrants seeking international protection. Many of these migrants find themselves in a liminal space of legal and social uncertainty in which they must contend with a range of limitations and distinct possibilities as they consider their ongoing trajectories. Through close attention to the social worlds that emerge around and within migrants’ transit communities, I explore central themes related to the existentiality of im/mobility, gendered experiences of transit migration, the paradoxes of institutional practices of refugee protection within predominant transit zones, and diverse forms of resilience and coping that are given breadth through collective travel. Ultimately, I argue that it is critical to explore the narratives and lived realities of those most affected by migration-centered policy and discourse, and to recognize the critical role that migrants play in challenging and reimagining the terms of their in/exclusion.

Numerous studies have examined the effect of natural disasters and social vulnerability indicators on broad factors using different theoretical frameworks; however, no study synthesizes a framework of theories to comprehensively examine the nexus among natural disasters, social vulnerability, subsidiarity principle, and government finance in the U.S. The dissertation utilizes a broad framework of theories to address two objectives of the dissertation namely the determinants of (1) infrastructure investment and (2) public assistance programs. Using panel data from 50 U.S states over a 17-time period (2000 – 2017), the first objective of the study investigates the determinants of infrastructure investment using a synthesis of theories. The study maintains that state infrastructure investment is not necessarily because of disaster punctuations but economic prosperity. The findings paint a picture of a proactive government that is perhaps prepared and does not act necessarily because of disaster events. The objective of the second study investigates the determinants of public assistance receipt assessed in 4 ways. The study maintains that subsidiarity assistance is influenced by both disasters and social vulnerabilities. However, disaggregating subsidiarity assistance into its sub-components (total public assistance, emergency work funds, permanent work funds, and intergovernmental transfers) provide a nuanced understanding of public assistance receipt. Federally declared disasters are strongly associated with disaster-relief forms of assistance, but not a significant determinant of intergovernmental transfers. Social vulnerability indicators, more especially – poverty, inequality (Gini), political influence, income, and infrastructure investment positively influence the receipt of federal intergovernmental transfers. The findings demonstrate that federal allocation of subsidiarity assistance follows a formula in terms of addressing wicked problems related to disasters and social vulnerabilities. In addition, the dissertation finds that disaster impact and social vulnerability theory additively explains the subsidiarity principle of U.S. federal government assistance programs to subnational governments. The dissertation contributes to theory, policy and management practices, and enlightens scholars and policymakers on the vital factors that stimulate state infrastructure investment and federal assistance receipt for best policy practice. Policymakers must constantly modify funding policies and effectively utilize tax-payer dollars following a formula to respond to jurisdictional vulnerabilities and public service needs

We are in a new global era, framed and shaped by migration and record movements across borders. The intersection of migration, mental health, and psychosocial wellbeing represents an increasingly important matter in the humanitarian space. Global rates of migration are at an all-time high, with internal and cross-border migration hitting record figures (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2020). Mexico is a country that has been particularly affected by migration, as a top country of transit, as well as destination for migrants and asylum-seekers from the Americas and across the globe. The rise of displaced people traveling to Mexico and the United States, in combination with limited protection and legal support for migrants, has resulted in an unprecedented situation requiring attention. Population displacement results from an array of push factors, including political instability, climate degradation, natural disasters, and economic/physical insecurity. As growing numbers of people migrate to and through Mexico in search of protection and improvements in livelihoods, it is crucial to consider gaps in access to support services for migrants and asylum-seekers. Access to health care has long been a challenge for migrant populations in Mexico (Infante, 2022), and in particular, barriers have been reported in relation to Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) for people migrating while seeking asylum further North (Allande, 2022). Thus, there exists a need for the provision of improved and adapted MHPSS programs for migrants in Mexico, with particular attention to those from outside of Mexico seeking asylum in the United States. Working in collaboration with local partners, this Integrated Learning Experience (ILE) summarizes findings from a multi-stage exploratory assessment. The overarching goal of this ILE was to identify opportunities for improving the design and implementation of MHPSS for migrant populations in Mexico. To do so, this research focused on addressing three specific aims: identify major gaps and challenges in delivering MHPSS services from the perspectives of practitioners and scholars (Aim 1); assess perceptions of existing MHPSS services from the perspective of intended users through in-depth inquiry with migrant communities (Aim 2); and, map barriers and facilitators to accessing MHPSS services as well as co-creating implementation strategies, tools and key recommendations through participatory workshops with key actors (Aim 3). The specific research methods utilized in this assessment included: A) synthesis of 3 years of survey data gathered from service providers, along with key informant interviews (KIIs) with service providers to identify existing programs, gaps, and challenges; B) focus group discussions with migrant populations combined with ethnographic observations to assess support and how they are perceived, and C) participatory workshops with key actors to co-create implementation strategies to improve supports from a systems perspective. By mapping existing MHPSS supports in key locations and engaging with different stakeholders through participatory methods, this ILE presents a systematic, conceptual approach to identify leverage points for improvements in programs that fit the unique situation and lived experiences of people on the move. The final recommendations outline practical steps to promote more coherent and comprehensive approaches to MHPSS programming while recognizing and responding to overlapping risks of violence, discrimination, and other challenges this population may face. Key takeaways reveal overall shortages in availability of services, and gaps in information-sharing and coordination. Most importantly, findings show a cultural disconnect with many MHPSS programs, calling for a rethink of how to design and implement services in a manner that better fit the realities and preferences of migrant communities. Ways forward include promoting cultural humility, community engagement, listening, and promoting agency in order to strengthen MHPSS practices that are grounded in and sensitive to the views of those migrating.

Sexual misconduct in the Army can range from inappropriate behavior to criminal assault. Despite shared Army values, rigorous ethics training, and oversight mechanisms, cases of Army general officers (senior leaders) perpetuating and/or enabling sexual misconduct to continue. In fact, research and statistics indicate that the frequency and severity of sexual misconduct has not decreased over time (Acosta et al., 2021; Office of People Analytics, Department of Defense, 2021). Existing literature suggests several possible contributing factors, including male-dominated, hyper-masculine military culture (Pang et al., 2021) and senior leaders and oversight committees’ failure to observe and/or enforce standards of ethical behavior (O’Keefe et al., 2020; Pang et al., 2021). This qualitative, embedded case study sought to identify and more deeply understand the organizational culture and oversight factors that foster or contribute to senior leaders’ unethical behavior and sexual misconduct in the Army, despite high levels of discipline and training (Whetham, 2021). The study also explored how female officers navigate the risks of victimization. The study included the following methods and sources: publicly available archival documents, individual interviews with retired senior Army leaders, and individual interviews with active and retired Army soldiers. The study’s findings identified the following as organizational culture and oversight factors: institutional dysfunction and ethical deterioration; discrimination against women, and fear of retaliation; inability of senior leaders to balance professional and personal life; ethical dilemmas and abuse of power; challenges in accountability; corruption and military cover ups; and impunity and injustice in the face of misconduct. The study’s findings identified the following as ways in which female officers attempt to cope and navigate risks: by empowering women in a male-dominated environment; supporting survivors of sexual trauma and ensuring justice. Overall, the findings provide insight into why sexual misconduct thrives and oversight fails in the Army and concludes that more research and advocacy are needed to achieve a new model of oversight that promotes ethical leadership guided by Army values.

Divorce and the Politics of the American Social Welfare Regime, 1969-2001 asks how rising divorce rates shaped the laws governing the American social welfare regime between 1969, when California passed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, and 2001. Scholars have shown that in the early 20th century the American social welfare regime developed to distribute economic resources, such as Social Security, to women through their husbands. Between 1967 and 1979, however, the United States’ divorce rate doubled. This dissertation investigates how this sudden challenge to the breadwinner-homemaker family structure affected the gendered welfare regime. Divorce and the Politics of the American Social Welfare Regime examines how women organized to gain access to lost economic resources after divorce and how policymakers responded to their demands. It reveals important and forgotten components of the histories of welfare state development, the feminist movement of the 1970s, and marriage law. It argues that, ironically, rising divorce rates led to a series of federal laws that actually strengthened the social welfare system’s use of marriage to determine eligiblity for benefits. These new laws specifically rewarded intact marriages by providing more robust benefits to women in longer marriages. In a political world increasingly concerned with the impermenance of marriage, Congress created a legal system that signaled that marriage was about length of commitment above all else.

This dissertation includes three papers examining role of childcare stability in the lives of families, focusing on low-income households. Paper one considers the relationship between household instability and childcare instability for parents with young children in New York City. Paper two examines the relationship between universal pre-kindergarten in New York City and education and employment outcomes for parents. Finally, paper three explores the effect of federal childcare subsidies on education and employment outcomes for parents.