Amanda Cheong (left) receives the ASA Section on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology's 2024 Outstanding Publication Award alongside fellow SPSS honorees Tony Jack (center) and Demar F. Lewis IV (right).
Q&A with Dr. Amanda Cheong
We are thrilled to welcome Amanda Cheong to the Contexts Blog in celebration of her recent Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Public Sociology and Sociological Practice (SPSS). In this post, blog editor Elena van Stee chats with Amanda about her award-winning feature article, partnership with the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and experience translating research to public audiences.
Read “How Driver’s Licenses Matter for Undocumented Immigrants” (from our Summer 2021 issue) here.
Elena van Stee: Hi, Amanda! The Contexts team is thrilled to celebrate your recent SPSS Publication Award. Let’s introduce you to our readers: who are you, where are you, and what do you study?
Amanda Cheong: Thank you so much, Elena! I’m excited that this article is being recognized and grateful for the opportunity to chat with you about it. I’m an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. In much of my research, I collaborate with stateless, undocumented, and refugee communities to understand how legal status and documents shape their everyday lives. This work is not just an intellectual preoccupation, but is deeply personal, as it’s inspired by my own family’s experiences with statelessness, racial discrimination, and migration.
EVS: Tell us more about the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF). How did you connect with this organization, and what has the partnership looked like?
AC: I’d be happy to! LALDEF is a grassroots non-governmental organization serving low-income immigrants in Mercer County, New Jersey. I first encountered LALDEF way back during my second year of grad school at Princeton University. I had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant for my dear mentor Patricia Fernández-Kelly’s undergraduate course on the sociology of race and ethnicity. This was a very special experience for me because I helped coordinate the course’s community-based learning initiative, in which students partnered with LALDEF to conduct research on various dimensions of immigrants’ integration experiences in the local community. I was so inspired by LALDEF’s mission—specifically, their innovative efforts to remedy undocumented immigrants’ challenges accessing official identification—that I applied for a Community Action Research Initiative grant from the American Sociological Association to continue working with them on research aimed at understanding and improving the well-being of the immigrant communities they serve. To my great excitement, our application was funded!
EVS: Introduce us to the feature essay that received this honor, “How Driver’s Licenses Matter for Undocumented Immigrants.” What do you hope readers take away from this piece?
AC: The issue we’re addressing in this article is that, in the majority of states across the United States, undocumented immigrants are not allowed to obtain driver’s licenses. In a country in which nearly 9 in 10 American adults are licensed to drive, not having a license poses a lot of challenges to one’s day-to-day living. It is practically a rite of passage into adulthood in American culture: driving a car gives you freedom, autonomy, and mobility.
LALDEF was a member of Let’s Drive NJ, a coalition of organizations advocating for legislative changes to expand access to driver’s licenses in New Jersey. In 2019, after our fieldwork was completed, New Jersey became the 15th state in the country to permit qualified drivers to obtain licenses regardless of immigration status.
What we observed prior to this change was that immigrants’ voices and perspectives were not adequately represented in political debates around whether undocumented immigrants should have the right to driver’s licenses. What is the lived, day-to-day experience of being an adult in the United States who wants to obtain a driver’s license but is legally unable to do so? What impacts does that deprivation have on various dimensions of immigrants’ well-being and integration?
We interviewed 21 immigrants living in the Mercer County area. They came from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras. What we found was that being “undocumented” in the United States has concrete, far-reaching consequences. For the immigrants we talked to, the literal deprivation of official identification below the federal level had multiple negative impacts on their everyday lives. More than just the denial of permission to operate a motor vehicle, immigrants—over and above the risks and challenges of living without authorized status—are deprived of recognition as autonomous individuals and constrained in their ability to contribute on economic, social, and civil levels.Immigrants spoke of hardships such as being unable to get to work on time if alternative transportation arrangements fell through or being stuck in bad jobs because they were so reliant on their employers to be able to get to work. Parents were unable to spend as much time with their children or participate in their school or extracurricular activities because these hours were instead spent stuck in public transport. Essential activities such as opening a bank account, applying for a credit card, going to the hospital, or even borrowing a book from the library require proof of identification—immigrants found themselves shut out of public life in the United States.
The bottom line is that immigrants want to be active, contributing members of their local communities, but the deprivation of driver’s licenses poses a major barrier. Expanding access to driver’s licenses is, therefore, good not only for immigrants but also for the communities in which they live.
As we detail in our article, there is a lot that states and municipal governments can do, even when immigration reform is stalled at the federal level. States can implement legislative changes to accept a wider range of documentary evidence of identity and residency for driver’s licenses. Local jurisdictions could consider institutionalizing local forms of identification, such as municipal ID cards or community-based ID programs (such as LALDEF’s innovative Mercer County Area Community ID card). These are practical measures that would make a huge difference for the inclusion of immigrants, their families, and other marginalized populations.
EVS: Why did you want to publish your ideas with Contexts?
AC: This is a project that is primarily driven by the policy and advocacy priorities, but the findings also have important theoretical implications that we knew would be of interest to migration scholars and political sociologists. I have long been a fan of the mission of Contexts, and we thought our project would find a good home here, where our sociological research could be mobilized to reach wider public audiences.
EVS: Do you have any advice for other sociologists interested in writing for a public audience?
AC: Doing community-based research has reinforced my awareness of the immense privilege I hold as an academic. This approach reminds me of the importance of sharing both the capacity for scholarly knowledge creation and platforms for its dissemination. I feel fortunate to have these privileges, though, at times, I find this responsibility intimidating! I think it’s important to be accountable to the communities that we engage in our research, and one way we can do this is by working in collaboration with them during the different stages of the research process—from design to data collection, analysis, and writing. Going back to what I said about sometimes feeling intimidated about sharing my work, whether that be in more traditional scholarly or more public-facing venues, I find a lot of comfort—and more importantly, motivation and purpose—when I know that my scholarly voice is not just my own, but is being shared with stakeholders whose perspectives, experiences, and knowledge urgently deserve to be heard.
EVS: What’s next for you?
AC: Mainly, I’m working on a book, Omitted Lives, which is based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted with stateless, undocumented, and legally marginalized families in Malaysia. Thematically, the book is similar to the Contexts article in that I am focusing on the at-times mortal consequences of not having the basic identity documents that make everyday life possible, and yet that many of us take for granted. Stay tuned!
Amanda R. Cheong is in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She works with undocumented, stateless, and refugee communities to research the impacts of citizenship and legal status on people’s lives. Elena G. van Stee is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. The blog editor for Contexts, she studies culture and inequality, focusing on families, education, and young adulthood.
