In a period of rising forced migration, due to war and political upheaval as well as climate change, my research examines how organizational processes shape inequality.

The number of displaced people has surpassed 80 million—one out of every 95 people on Earth. Yet, less than one percent of refugees are resettled each year, and many remain in displacement for decades in the Global South. In many contexts, work is legally restricted. How do refugees get resources to make ends meet?

My second book project, Dreams Derailed: Barriers to Getting Ahead in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya examines the economic costs of long-term displacement. Based on over 14 months of ethnographic observation in Kakuma refugee camp, 155 interviews with aid workers and refugees, and longitudinal weekly questionnaires with refugee households, this book reveals the strategies of refugee families to rebuild resources. This project highlights the importance of refugee community ties and informal organizations, like churches, women’s groups, and ethnic associations. These organizations not only structured the makeup of refugee networks, but also enabled collective mobilization and solutions. Nonetheless, within a context of budget cuts to humanitarian organizations (such as the United Nations Refugee Agency) and restricted rights, families faced barriers to getting ahead. This research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, and Swahili language training through U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships.

I am also the first author of the book We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America with Annette Lareau published with the University of California Press. Based on extensive fieldwork with Congolese refugee families and aid workers and volunteers, We Thought It Would Be Heaven reveals how the very social service organizations meant to help resettled refugees can derail their progress in building a new life in the United States. Seemingly small organizational errors—missing a deadline, mistaking a rule, or misplacing a form—tangle processes and impede access to crucial resources. For some, these obstacles impeded upward mobility. Others, with the help of cultural brokers, "institutional insiders" and effective social programs, were able to move ahead, buying a house and sending their children to college.

I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania (2022), M.A. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania (2015), and B.A. in Urban Studies and African and African American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis (2012).

blair_sackett@brown.edu