University at Albany Richard D. Alba has been named one of only two sociologists nationwide to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for academic year 2000–2001. He will use the prestigious award, which carries with it a stipend of $34,000, to study second generations in immigration societies, it was announced by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Glenna Spitze, chair of the Department of Sociology, said, "We are extremely proud of our colleague, Richard Alba, who in addition to this Guggenheim Fellowship for the coming year is vice president-elect of the American Sociological Association. He has a distinguished international reputation for his work on race/ethnicity and migration."
Alba said that he will devote half of the year to his role as associate research director at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He will work with Dr. Roxanne Silberman, a leading researcher on the children of immigrants in France. Alba will be examining how the children of immigrants fare in different countries that have received a great deal of immigration since 1950. The countries will include the U.S., Canada, Australia, France, Germany (where Alba had two previous Fulbright fellowships), and the United Kingdom.
"One motivation for the project is that Americans have been very focused on immigration for a long time, but we only think about immigration in American society," said Alba. "We assume the U.S. is unique in its capacity to absorb immigrants. I plan to test this assumption of exceptionalism by looking at how the children of immigrants do in other countries. Immigration is a worldwide phenomenon and we can learn from the experience of other countries."
Some of the questions Alba will be asking include:
- Is assimilation, once prevalent among the children of past immigrants to the U.S. and France, still applicable to contemporary immigrations?;
- Does assimilation occur mainly in countries that have national ideologies to actively promote it?;
- Will transnational connections on a scale never before seen in human history forestall assimilation and engender ethnic pluralism to a new extent?; and
- Does the phenomenon of "segmented" assimilation, or assimilation into disadvantaged minority status, only occur among certain groups deemed black by North American standards, or does this occur on a broader scale, for example, to North African groups in France?
By the end of the year, Alba expects to complete a comparative paper on bilingualism and language assimilation, and at least two others on aspects of socioeconomic incorporation.
Alba joined the UAlbany sociology faculty in 1980. In 1981 he became founding director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, and in 1985 was named a professor in the Department of Public Affairs and Policy. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Contact: Vincent Reda,
518-437-4985
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