Sneha Girap (Editor)

Jeffrey H Cohen

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Name
  
Jeffrey Cohen


Jeffrey H. Cohen wwwmigrationletterscomsitebuilderimagescohen

Education
  
Indiana University Bloomington

Books
  
Cultures of Migration: The Glob, The Culture of Migration, Cooperation and Community

Jeffrey H. Cohen (born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1962) is an American anthropologist.

Jeffrey Cohen grew up in Indianapolis, where he attended Indianapolis Public School #86 and Shortridge High School. For college he attended Indiana University. He went on to earn his PhD also at Indiana under the guidance of Richard Wilk. Cohen's work is centered ethnographically in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. For his dissertation, he explored how an indigenous, peasant community responded to globalization. Since that time much of his work focuses on migration, economic development and identity. He graduated with his doctorate in 1994 and is currently an associate professor at The Ohio State University in the department of anthropology and a member of steering committee for the Initiative in Population Research. Since the late 1980s he has worked in Oaxaca's central valleys region and specifically in the community of Santa Ana del Valle, documented in his book, Cooperation and Community, published in 1999 by the University of Texas Press.

In 2004 he published the Culture of Migration, also with the University of Texas Press. This book documents a long term study of migration in 13 villages, all located in Oaxaca's central valleys. The book argues that a "culture of migration" defines movement and frames migration as one of the many strategic moves Oaxacans participate in to organize their lives. Cohen notes the importance of domestic migration, the rise of international and transnational movers and the role that remittances play in the lives of Oaxaquenos in their home communities.

He has also worked on Dominican migration to the US where he was part of an interdisciplinary investigation of why Dominicans are traveling to Reading, PA. He also conducts collaborative and comparative research with Ibrahim Sirkeci on Kurdish and Mexican immigration issues.

In 2007 he began an analysis of the impact of political and civil unrest in Oaxaca on migration patterns and compared Oaxacan and Chiapaneco migration patterns. He also studies food and nutrition among immigrants and the role traditional foods, such as chapulines (grasshoppers) play for Oaxacans.

He is also co-editor of Migration Letters journal.

In 2010, an editorial written for the Kirwan institute on immigration reform and the Arizona state's recent moves to enforce federal laws was featured in the Huffington Post.

References

Jeffrey H. Cohen Wikipedia