Jake Watson

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. I use mixed methods approaches to study the governance of international migration, with a focus on refugees. To this end, I have conducted fieldwork across Africa, North America, and Europe. I'm particularly interested in how and why states classify different groups of migrants as worthy of admission, status, and resources, and how these decisions become embedded in organizational and bureaucratic systems. I am also interested in how these governance regimes reflect broader racial inequalities and global power imbalances, and I draw on ethnographic methods to explore how migrants develop a sense of identity and political subjectivity through nested interactions with the law in their everyday lives. My work has been featured in American Sociological Review, European Journal of Sociology, Ethnic & Racial Studies, the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, and Social Problems.