Elizabeth Cohen, Ph.D.
efcohen@bu.edu
Full Professor
Boston University
Year of PhD: 2003
Country: United States (Massachusetts)
Research Interests
Immigration & Citizenship
Time Burdens
My Research:
Elizabeth F. Cohen is the Maxwell Professor of United States Citizenship in the Department of Political Science at Boston University and Associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science. She received a BA from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Yale University. Cohen is the author of four books: Illegal: How America’s Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2020); The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018; winner of 2019 American Political Science Association Best Book in Migration and Citizenship; translated into Korean, 2020); Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Citizenship (with Cyril Ghosh) (Polity Press, 2019). Her scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in venues such as Ethics, Ethics in International Affairs, Citizenship Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, and the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy. In addition to her scholarly writing, Cohen has also published op-eds in newspapers such as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico and El Pais. Cohen has been a visiting scholar at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. In addition, her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York Historical Society.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
A look at how temporary immigration statuses have proliferated in the US and an evaluation of whether this is consistent with longstanding US immigration principles.
Books Written:
Waiting periods and deadlines are so ubiquitous that we often take them for granted. Yet they form a critical part of any democratic architecture. When a precise moment or amount of time is given political importance, we ought to understand why this is so. The Political Value of Time explores the idea of time within democratic theory and practice. Elizabeth F. Cohen demonstrates how political procedures use quantities of time to confer and deny citizenship rights. Using specific dates and deadlines, states carve boundaries around a citizenry. As time is assigned a form of political value it comes to be used to transact over rights. Cohen concludes with a normative analysis of the ways in which the devaluation of some people’s political time constitutes a widely overlooked form of injustice. This book shows readers how and why they need to think about time if they want to understand politics.
In every democratic polity there exist individuals and groups who hold some but not all of the essential elements of citizenship. Scholars who study citizenship routinely grasp for shared concepts and language that identify forms of membership held by migrants, children, the disabled, and other groups of individuals who, for various reasons, are neither full citizens nor non-citizens. This book introduces the concept of semi-citizenship as a means to dramatically advance debates about individuals who hold some but not all elements of full democratic citizenship. By analytically classifying the rights of citizenship and their various combinations, scholars can typologize semi-citizens and produce comparisons of different kinds of semi-citizenships and of semi-citizenships in different states. The book uses theoretical analysis, historical examples, and contemporary cases of semi-citizenship to illustrate how normative and governmental doctrines of citizenship converge and conflict, making semi-citizenship an enduring and inevitable part of democratic politics.
Other:
There are many reasons to be concerned about Trump’s executive order on border security and memoranda on immigration policy. He is clearly set on sealing the country’s southern border and indiscriminately deporting large numbers of people, a toxic combination of nativist policies with ominous implications for the U.S. economy and society. For all the deserved criticism of Trump’s proposal, one big thing has been taken for granted: that it would actually succeed in reducing the undocumented population. In fact, walling off the southern border and throwing out residents who have been working in U.S. for extended periods of time could yield the exact opposite result. Turning ourselves into an anti-immigrant police state could actually increase the population of long-term undocumented people in the U.S....
An "originalist" look at whether the founders would have supported a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.