
Aaron Ponce
Professor Aaron Ponce was a CRRES Visiting Scholar during the 2018-2019 year. Aaron is Assistant Professor of sociology at Michigan State University. His research draws on the sociology of immigration and global migration, political sociology, and race and ethnicity. Aaron's work investigates how overlapping symbolic boundaries (race, gender, religion) constitute citizenship and national ways of belonging in immigrant-receiving societies. Much of his recent work has focused on immigration to Europe, and on the reception and perception of Muslim immigrant populations. His current work compares the Muslim experience in Europe and the U.S., and examines Muslim Americans' and other immigrant-background groups' status in a historically racialized landscape. Among the questions that his research has answered are: Do more accommodating modes of belonging increase migration? How do racial hierarchies define which groups are perceived as assimilable or desirable? How do seemingly discrete social categories (religion, gender) become racialized in processes of group boundary making? Findings from his research speak to the contradictions inherent in immigration regimes, immigrant reception processes, and the norms that define and reinforce liberal democracies.