Karen Tejada, associate professor of sociology in Hillyer College, has been awarded the highly prestigious Russell Sage Visiting Scholars Fellowship for the 2025–26 academic year. She will spend her time at the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) in New York completing her book project that examines the impacts of “crimmigration,” the merging of the criminal justice and immigration systems – on Salvadorans in Long Island. This comes after a three-year $101,472 grant from the RSF to conduct qualitative research for the project. In addition, she has been awarded a sabbatical from the university that will coincide with the fellowship.
Karen will be joined in her residency by sixteen fellow scholars in the social sciences from Harvard, Boston University, Penn, Berkeley, UC Davis, the CUNY Graduate Center, Emory, Queens College, Wayne State, Northwestern, UMass-Amherst, Texas A&M and the University of Denver.
In her book project, she argues that gang-related enforcement efforts are one way to facilitate this “racial project” and fuel the deportation machinery. Based on a multi-sited and multi-year qualitative study, she is able to show the toll that this “legal violence” take on these communities and suggests this is by design, as crimmigration practices scapegoat Salvadorans to expand the role of the criminal justice system in the U.S.
The Russell Sage Foundation is an American non-profit organization established in 1907 that dedicates itself to strengthening the methods, data and theoretical core of the social sciences to better understand societal problems and develop informed responses.
See here for Karen’s profile at the RSF.