Admissions: ​International Students, Higher Education,
​and Immigration Governance in the United States

"Admissions" is a dissertation research project that examines how international students navigate the Optional Practical Training work program as a path to legal permanent residence and eventually citizenship. The nonimmigrant to immigrant adjustment process constitutes a complex legal rite of passage through which nonimmigrants can be made into immigrants. Through long-term ethnography, interviews, and interpretative policy analysis, I trace these local processes of immigration adjustment and subjectivity formation – that is, how non-state actors administer and enact local policies and narratives that render legal, national citizenship accessible to individuals otherwise prohibited from immigrating. Examination of the various limen that separate student from citizen sheds light on an understudied process of noncitizen incorporation, regimes of migration policy work that straddle federal governance and institutions of higher education, and shifts in migrant labor markets.

For more information, please email me at k.eva.weiss@temple.edu.

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Explore the international student experience
with my friend and collaborator, Sadeepa

When You Fall from a Tree (trailer)

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Eva works at the intersection of disability and immigration. As a Research Associate at the Institute on Disabilities she contributes to local, state and national projects, examining secondary transition, supported decision-making, the school-to-prison pipeline and deinstitutionalization. Eva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Temple University. Her research applies critical disability theory to the examination of immigration governance to reveal overlooked and interlocking regimes of ableism, nativism and racism, which actively produce labor market inclusion and social exclusion.