Kristen Hill Maher

After earning her PhD in Political Science from the University of California at Irvine, Kristen Hill Maher joined the SDSU Political Science department in 1999. She has been active in developing the graduate Public Policy emphasis and teaches the core seminar as well as electives on immigration and public policy. At the undergraduate level, she teaches courses on U.S. immigration and border politics, comparative citizenship policy, public policy, democratic theory, and nationalism.

Her research examines the complex positions international labor migrants occupy in relation to state policies, economic forces, and social attitudes. In particular, she analyzes how the rights and claims to equality that migrants formally hold are hard to claim in practice. This phenomenon is especially true among female migrants working in the service sector, or in jobs that have traditionally been relegated to women.

She has conducted a number of field studies on these themes, most of them in Southern California, where growing numbers of household service jobs are being filled by women from Mexico and other Latin American states. Using ethnographic methods, she has examined the labor market for foreign domestic workers as well as popular ambivalence about race and immigration in the suburbs where foreign workers are employed. She has done similar work examining Peruvian migrant domestic workers in Santiago, Chile, a project conducted in collaboration with Silke Staab at the University of Cologne.

Maher has also conducted research on the migration of women filling traditional women's roles among the more developed states of the Pacific Rim. She organized an international conference held at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at UCSD in 2003. This conference was the culmination of a year-long post-doctoral fellowship at CCIS, where she continues to serve as an affiliated faculty member.

Most recently, her research interests have turned to border politics. She is currently doing work on the San Diego-Tijuana border region in comparative perspective.

Her recent publications include:

"The Dual Discourse about Peruvian Domestic Workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, Gender, and a Nationalist Project." Forthcoming in Latin American Politics and Society. With Silke Staab.

"Nanny Politics: The Dilemmas of Working Women's Empowerment in Santiago, Chile." International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7, 1 ( 2005): 71-88. With Silke Staab.

"Borders and Social Distinction in the Global Suburb." American Quarterly 56, 3 (2004): 781-806.

"Good Women 'Ready to Go': Labor Brokers and the Transnational Maid Trade." Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 1, 1 (2004): 59-80.

"Globalized Social Reproduction: Immigrant Service Workers and the Citizenship Gap," in People Out of Place, Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir, eds. Routledge, 2004.

"'Natural Mothers' for Sale: The Construction of Latina Immigrant Identity in Domestic Service Labor Markets." In Immigrant Life in the U.S.: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives, Donna Gabbaccia and Colin Wayne Leach, eds. Routledge, 2004.

"Workers and Strangers: The Household Service Economy and the Landscape of Suburban Fear." Urban Affairs Review 38, 6 (2003): 751-786. Reprinted in Spanish in Renglones (No. 55, Oct-Dec 2003: 72-93), a Mexican journal on culture and politics.

Between semesters, Maher retreats to the Wet Mountain Valley in Colorado, ostensibly to write. Now that she's tenured, she also spends summers playing guitar with a folk band and volunteering in a nonprofit animal therapy program for youth (www.pacapeace.org).