Episode 142 - Chiara Galli: "Every rose has its thorns."

Assistant Professor Chiara Galli from the Department of Comparative Human Development is on The Course to talk about how her childhood experience moving to the US from Italy influenced her decision to study migrant issues. Professor Galli also shares various insights on choosing a major, being in an interdisciplinary department, and also her love for research methods. Don't miss out on her sharing!

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello and welcome to the course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I am speaking with Professor Chiara Galli of the Department of Comparative Human Development. Professor Galli studies the experiences of immigrant children and asylum seekers, and how immigration policy affects migrants and communities. Her first book Precarious Protections, Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the United States, was published in 2023 by the University of California Press.

She's here today to talk about her research, why she's a proud self-identified methods nerd, and how she became a University of Chicago professor.

Professor Galli, thank you so much for joining me on The Course today. How are you doing? 

Chiara Galli 00:39
I'm fine. Thanks. Thanks for having me. 

Stephen 00:41
Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. Could you please tell our listeners your title at the university and just a little bit in layman's terms about what it is that you teach and study? 

Chiara Galli 00:50
Yeah, so I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. So we are an interdisciplinary department composed of sociologists like myself, anthropologists, psychologists, and biopsychologists. So a very, really diverse kind of eclectic bunch of social scientists doing work on a series of themes, such as, the life course, migration, gender, medical anthropology, disabilities. Oh, and animal behavior as well.

Stephen 01:29
Okay. Wow. that's pretty broad and interesting. Can you fill us in a little bit on like where your specialization lies within?

Chiara Galli 01:36
Yes, of course, because I clearly don't do all of the above, right? That would be a really eclectic research agenda. So, my area of expertise is in the study of international migration. I'm also very interested in kind of these questions tied to the life course or how migration expands experiences differ across the life course. I'm especially interested in the experiences of children and teenagers. So what makes them unique as migratory actors as compared to adults? And also how does the state regulate them in different ways because they are children, right? And hence, one would hope and assume a deserving of some kind of additional protection.

And you know, I focus primarily on Latin American migration to the United States, and I'm very interested in the experiences of asylum seekers, all the other vulnerable groups of migrants. So sort of questions about how the state categorizes and treats them and how they're received by rich countries like the United States and its residents.

Stephen 02:39
Could you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and what you kind of expected, you know, your career might have in store for you when you were, um, I usually say when you're around high school age, but I know, I think you grew up in Italy. I'm not exactly sure, but yeah, you know, around that time. 

Chiara Galli 02:54
Well, you know, so I could tell you the kind of clean version. I can tell you the real version, I'm going to tell you the real version, which is that I definitely didn't know I wanted to be a sociologist and an academic at an early age, certainly I didn't have very clear ideas about what I wanted to do professionally in high school, which I think you know might be nice for people who are high school age or even college age to hear because I think it's quite normal to have, you know, diverse interests and not an entirely clear view of, you know, one's professional trajectory.

Actually, I wanted to be an actress in high school. So very different kind of professional trajectory. But I do think, you know, I was always very interested in questions around migration because of my personal experience as a migrant. So I did grow up in Italy for part of my childhood, but I also spent another part of that childhood in the United States in a small town in a suburb to the north of Chicago.

And, you know, so I always sort of felt in between different societies sort of as a perpetual semi outsider or, you know, kind of not real insider in wherever I tended to live at the time. So I think that kind of my intellectual curiosity for the study of migration started at a young age, but in terms of like my professional goals those became focused much later.

Stephen 04:22
Am I right? You attended high school in the US like you graduated from high school. 

Chiara Galli 04:26
I attended an American school in Rome, actually. You know, in choosing undergrad, it was sort of a negotiation with my family that, you know, being an actor was not a pragmatic career choice and like would not come with a reliable source of income.

You know, the kinds of anxieties that parents tend to have. And so, you know, I chose a kind of a degree I thought was interesting at the time, which is basically an interdisciplinary degree in development economics. But you know, it was really very, it was, it's called development economics, but really very interdisciplinary.

So I took classes from, you know, geography, sociology, anthropology. So I really think I've been steeped in these kind of interdisciplinary environments since kind of the beginning of my academic trajectory. And then, you know, as I kept studying about, you know, the issues in what we call kind of developing countries, and I chose to specialize in Latin America.

And, you know, it became more and more clear to me that I was actually much more interested in kind of trying to think about and solve social problems that were happening at home, rather than being, you know, one of these, you know, development specialist that then goes abroad to solve other country's problems. That was kind of my perspective at the time. 

And so I, so for my master's degree, I decided to go on and actually do an interdisciplinary master's in migration studies, which was a fantastic program at the University of Granada in Spain. So I have this kind of very international kind of training, and exposure to different university systems.

And it was during that master's degree that I really discovered my love for research, because we had the opportunity to take classes in research methods. I was able to do, you know, my first independent research project, which was a study on micro entrepreneurs migrant micro-entrepreneurs in Granada and sort of the ways in which nonprofits are helping train them and try to figure out how to get loans and start small businesses, et cetera.

And I had a mentor, in that program who supervised my thesis, Dr. Carmen Lizarraga, who's actually an economist, who really told me that I was, you that I had sort of a knack or a gift for research, I guess. And so she taught, she thought that I could pursue a PhD. So that's when I really started thinking seriously about it. Although it would be kind of a detour into the professional world before I actually, applied to grad school. 

After my master's in Grana, I worked in sort of the nonprofit and policy kind of research world for, you know, two, three years, I think. And then I applied to go to grad school at UCLA. So what I did was, you know, a PhD program. So, you know, that has a master kind of enroute to the PhD. And I chose a sociology program. 

This is something that, you know, listeners might be interested in, but it was interesting for me, like how to like choose a grad program because I had always been in these really interdisciplinary spaces. I have to kind of figure out what a discipline was, frankly. Because, you know, the vast, like now I work in the school department, we have an interdisciplinary PhD. But really, most PhDs are disciplinary. And, you know, the way I went about that was I was sort of like going back to the stuff that I had been reading and my master's program and even an undergrad. And I figured out that sort of the people who thought about social problems in similar ways to me, or the way to the way I was hoping to think about them were sociologists.

So that's kind of how I gravitated towards the discipline. Although, you know, I continue to really read very broadly and think in very interdisciplinary ways, which I think is really why I ended up in this interdisciplinary department. 

Stephen 08:18
Can you pinpoint a moment or, you know, was there any kind of major impetus that made you think, I need to go get a PhD, like, I want to make that pivot. Was that kind of like a gradual thing or can you point to something that you feel was like the decision point? 

Chiara Galli 08:34
Well, you know, so it's two things, right? So I think there was, on the one hand, I've always felt like conflicted between being a thinker and a fixer, if that makes sense. Like I wasn't quite sure whether I wanted to do something to improve the world and actually work on, you know, social problems like helping migrants, in, you know, more of an advocacy or community-based organization, nonprofit capacity. Or if I prefer to kind of sit back and intellectually think and reflect upon these issues.

And, you know, I was told about that for quite a bit, and certainly, you know, the world of nonprofits is, you know, is a very stimulating, wonderful world to work in, but it is, you know, one that comes with certain amounts of also labor precarity, right? So there was also kind of a practical, thinking of, you know, maybe I want to have a career that is, you know, provides me more stability, where I have a clearer trajectory that I'm, you know, I'm going to be a faculty member.

Whereas, you know, in my nonprofit roles, I was often transitioning between different organizations every six months or nine months. So it was, you know, kind of a whirlwind. And then, you know, I would start my new role and learn a lot about what the organization would do, was doing and quickly become like very critical of what I was seeing.

So that kind of made me shift more towards, you know, being a, you know, thinking that I'm probably more of a thinker than a figure after all. You know what I mean, I do, you know, for my research, continue to collaborate very closely with community-based organizations, nonprofits, you know, legal advocates.

I have a deep deep admiration for the very important work they do and a lot of respect for what they do. It's very difficult. I think it's more difficult to fix than to think. And so, you know, I love working with students who want to pursue those kinds of career trajectories because that is something that's very exciting to me and something that I want to be very supportive of, right?

It's great, it's wonderful if you want to be an academic, but not everyone can, should do that or doesn't, shouldn't feel inclined. They need to do that because there's all sorts of exciting career trajectories. 

Stephen 10:40
I can you just tell me a little bit about your you know, your PhD work and specifically, if you, this was a subject area that you, as you said, you'd been reading a lot and you know, you'd been working in and had studied for a long time. What was different? What did you learn and how did you grow from actually going and doing a PhD in this? 

Chiara Galli 11:06
Oh my goodness, so much. I’m a drastically different person, I grew in so many ways. You know, I think the UCLA sociology program is a phenomenal program that trains people very well. And it's a great place to study migration because it was a really vibrant intellectual community. So, you know, I had a lot of colleagues at my career stage.

So other graduate students doing exciting projects, a lot of fantastic mentors. So it was a wonderful space to grow right where we had a lot of support. And it was really generative space to come up with new ideas right as you're starting. To transition really from being a consumer of knowledge to being someone who produces knowledge, right?

And I learned so much through my dissertation research, and I was really committed to this one project. I mean, I started my dissertation research, so I moved to Los Angeles, you know, to start grad school. I think it was in September 2014, and by January I had started my research that would then become my dissertation research, and then culminated into my first book.

I started the research in an ethnographic methods class, where it was a practicum, so basically we had to find a field site, we were kind of thrown into the field. So, you know, I'm coming from a foreign country, once again, like, not with a lot of connections at all in LA.

So I started sending a bunch of cold emails. I had a very vague kind of idea of, that, I want to study something about how policies impact immigrants lives. And  one of these organizations, you know, that I anonymized in the research, which was a legal aid organization was very receptive to the idea of having me do research there.

I speak Spanish, so I was, you know, volunteering my time in exchange for the access, and it just so happened to be the time in which there had been a big surge at the border. So a lot of Central American families and unaccompanied children were arriving in the U. S., most of whom at the time were going to L.A., and they were applying for asylum.

And so I started, you know, seeing how lawyers interacted with these asylum seekers, particularly, I was really interested in the experiences of children. I sort of stumbled upon this topic and I realized that it was really important. No one seemed to be thinking about this.

It was a growing population of migrants, children who are, you know, crossing international borders alone to seek asylum. And so, I really, I stuck with the project throughout grad school, ended up doing six years of research on the topic and I grew immensely, through the research experience but also really by learning from my research participant.

So both the immigration attorneys who helped asylum seekers submit their claims with the U. S. Immigration Bureaucracy, but also with the Central American and, you know, children who are undergoing this legal process.

Stephen 13:49
 Yeah, I mean, I just, my first thought is as you're describing it is that sounds like that must be kind of emotionally taxing. I mean, not everyone that I interview is speaking, you know, regularly and actually like interviewing so much, in their professional life, people who are going through that kind of thing.

Chiara Galli 14:04
Well, yeah, it was extraordinarily emotionally taxing. It really was, you know, speaking to individuals who have undergone a lot of traumatic experiences is something that is very difficult and it's something that needs to be done with a lot of tact and when I was in grad school I got a lot of great training, but no one really sat me down and explained to me. How do you do like a trauma informed, trauma sensitive interview? Right? That's not really part of your basic social science toolkit. So I had to do a lot of reading and kind of educate myself on this. And it, you know, and it was challenging. But so, I developed certain strategies to make sure that I was interacting with my respondents in ways that wouldn't be retraumatizing or triggering for them.

Because ultimately, you know, my research isn't this important that I need to retraumatize someone in a research encounter, right? This was very clear to me, from day one. But it was really kind of an individual study because I didn't have a lot of kind of guidance in the form of classes or specific training on this. And so, this is something that I now try to provide to my students, you know, kind of using my own experience to train them in these kind of trauma sensitive research methods. 

How in terms of how I dealt with it, I mean, not very well, frankly, you know, I was just sad and angry a lot of the time. I think that what helped me most was probably the moments when I got to have a chance to step back from the fieldwork a little bit and do some reflecting and writing.

I think that there was a cathartic kind of therapeutic element to the writing, in addition to kind of the analytic work of, you know, looking at the quote unquote data or the testimonies, to write up the results. I tried to also, you know, again, be kind of a doer in some ways. So, so to write some op eds and policy reports to feel like I was using my research to make a change. That all helped me kind of deal with, you know, these feelings of kind of frustration and anger I was feeling because frankly, I felt very impotent, right?

I was kind of limited in what I could do to actually my research respondents, right. And, you know, feeling sad is not a very productive way to feel but, you know, secondary or vicarious trauma is very real. And I think that these are important conversations to have and conversations that I like to have with my students as I'm training them to go on and do this kind of work with vulnerable populations. 

Stephen 16:26
That leads right to what I was going to ask, which is, yeah, just how you have translated this into teaching yourself. I mean, cause, you know, different people come into the job, of the teaching part of the job, you know, with very different experiences, can you tell us a little bit about what you have taught and like how you've approached it? 

Chiara Galli 16:44
Yeah, absolutely. So I teach four classes at the University of Chicago. So I actually teach research methods. So I, you know, I consider myself a huge research methods geek. I love teaching methods and thinking about methods. And I teach a wonderful class for our department, which is a requirement of our major for our comparative human development majors. And it's called human development research design. And it's a class that I would have loved to take as an undergrad but did not have the opportunity. So I basically, it's a nine week class and each week we review a different social science method and also how to come up with a research project.

So we start on, so what is a research question? How do you come up with a sound research design? How do you sort of match methods to the kinds of questions you're asking? And then we go through when we teach, you know, experimental methods, quantitative methods, survey, data analysis, in depth interviewing, ethnographic methods, how to analyze qualitative data, and then sort of how to bring it all together and write a paper.

So that class is an absolute blast to teach. I love it. And I bring in so many examples from my own research, you know. Anecdotes about field work. I show students how I go about and code my interview transcripts. I tell students, you know, anecdotes from my friend's research. I mean, I think that's something that's very cool about kind of, you know, going to grad school with a group of pretty amazing scholars is that then, you know, everyone's books start to come out and you get to teach those books and that's a very exciting thing because you know some of the backstory, right, of, you know, what were some of the exciting things and the challenges that researchers faced during the project that don't make it to the book, right?

So I love sharing these kinds of things with the students and I think that they quite enjoy that as well. Take them, bring research alive to them. I mean, fundamentally it's people who do research, right? It's not just some kind of abstract thing done by robots. So I think it's nice for them to be able to kind of see the people behind the work.

And then I teach three classes that are very in line with kind of my substantive areas of expertise. So I teach in the core, I teach human rights and world civilization. So we have, you know, a lot on refugees and asylum seekers in that class. I teach a class on international migration, which is sort of a broad overview of the field, focusing primarily on issues of state policies and politics and how states categorize migrants is really what I'm most interested in.

And then I teach a very fun graduate seminar on the sociology of childhood, where we read a lot of books by scholars who work on various dimensions of, you know, children in society, whether that be education, children and migration, how children think about racial categories, children's socialization, the role of parents, we touched on all of these different themes.

And that's also a really great class. And I enjoy working with grad students in that class because they're usually in the stage of thinking about how to design their own dissertations with working with children, which is a very challenging population to do research with. And so, you know, we read the books both for substance but also for methods to think about, you know, how can we then go on, how can each of them then go on and apply what they learned, right, from these authors in their own research.

Stephen 20:08
Yeah. It's always interesting to me, methods is usually not like, I guess, the sexiest part of someone's, like, research or graduate experience, but I feel like that is something that people coming into it often, like have barely thought about, like, oh how are we actually structuring this? How are we actually making sure we're getting, like, good data? 

Chiara Galli 20:23
Yeah, well, methods are very important, but also I think, you know, it's very, very fun. But maybe it's because, as I told you, I'm a methods nerd. So, 

Stephen 20:33
What would you say is fun about research method,s if you could?

Chiara Galli 20:35
Well, you know, I mean, I think, you know, as someone who, I do some quantitative work with administrative data from the U.S. Immigration Bureaucracy. And I mean, I like being used, able to use different methods to ask different kinds of questions, but really the bulk of my work is qualitative. So, you know, I do really in-depth ethnographic fieldwork where I get to know people really well and I follow them over time.

You know, I do in depth interviews where, you know, I sit with people for hours and I listen to their stories. And for me, you know, fieldwork is really, it's the thrill of discovery, right? I mean, what I always tell my students is, if we had the answers to questions, we wouldn't have to do fieldwork, right? 

I mean, fieldwork is what you do to really discover new and kind of emerging patterns in the world, study new phenomenon and get at things that, you know, sort of higher level, you know, more quantitative analyses can't get at, like, what are the mechanisms that explain some of these correlations that we're seeing in survey research, I really enjoy doing fieldwork. 

I think it can be very, very exhausting to, you know, dedicate yourself to ethnographic work, but it's fantastic. I love learning from people

Stephen 21:46 
 I've heard you express that there's a lot about your job that you like a lot, and I'm glad to hear that. Is there anything you don't like so much? Is there any part of this that you feel like people going into it should know, like, you know, it's not all fun and games or not all enrichment. 

Chiara Galli 22:00
Well, sure. I mean, you know, all, so you know, when I was thinking about applying to grad school, my mentor in my master's program told me every rose has its thorns, right? I mean, every job is going to have stuff you don't like about it. It is a challenging career trajectory because unfortunately the academic job market is, you know, there's far fewer jobs than there are very qualified, brilliant people coming out with PhDs from, you know, with impressive publication records, it's getting more and more competitive.

So it is not for the faint of heart and you know, that's the thing that I always tell students, who are considering a Ph.D. are you willing to take sort of a pretty big risk, with not necessarily a reward at the end. Even if you work very, very, very hard. I think that this is something that is frustrating for a lot of us who are scholars who sort of made it to like you know, a great job, like, working at the University of Chicago. 

Stephen 23:00
What are you excited to work on going forward? 

Chiara Galli 23:03
Yeah, so my book, Precarious Protections and Ethnography of Central American Children's Asylum Applications, right, and how non profit immigration attorneys help them apply for asylum based on my dissertation fieldwork in Los Angeles. So I am continuing work on this population, which is basically half of my new research agenda, and then there's also another half of my research agenda, so I'll tell you about both.

So, you know, I was very interested after I had done this, you know, very in depth qualitative study in Los Angeles, to sort of see to what extent some of the patterns I was observing could be found in more like, more generally, right at the national scale in the United States. And so right now I have a quantitative study using administrative data from the U.S. Immigration Court, to kind of try to find unaccompanied children in that data set, which is more, is very complex, actually, because we have quite poor record keeping practices in the immigration bureaucracy in this country, unfortunately, to study a series of outcomes, like what determines which children get access to counsel, because we don't guarantee legal representation to children in deportation proceedings in this country.

And also what shapes, what are the factors that determine whether they're allowed to stay or have to leave the country. And of course, representation is one huge piece of that puzzle, but it's not the only one. So that's an ongoing project.

And then I'm also doing a new ethnographic study that I started now over a year, almost a year and a half ago, which is a blast because I get to do this with a team of undergraduate and graduate student research assistants.

So it's a group ethnography, an interview based study that we're doing in Chicago with asylum seekers who've been bused from the border states, primarily Texas to our city. And this is a study which, unlike my book, which focused much more on the legal aspects of seeking asylum, this is really sort of an urban ethnography that looks at how the city of Chicago, broadly defined, is responding to this influx of asylum seekers who are primarily from Venezuela by, for example, opening a series of migrant shelters to house them. So, you know, we're interested in kind of the policy responses, but also the community level responses. So how everyday Chicagoans have sort of rolled up their sleeves to help the newcomers. Also, some of the backlash that has occurred because migrant shelters have been open in neighborhoods.

So this has exacerbated some racial tensions by, in some cases, rapidly changing the demographics of neighborhoods. Neighborhoods, for instance, when migrant shelters have been opened and they're predominantly Blacks outside of Chicago. And then also, you know, we're interested in how Venezuelan asylum seekers themselves are, you know, experiencing these policies, the city shelters, and interacting with, you know, neighbors who both help or maybe are not quite so happy that they are living near their home.

So it's a very big, ambitious study that I'm really interested in, able to do thanks to the help of my magnificent research assistant. So we have many, many eyes and many notebooks in the field, whereas, you know, I was really kind of doing a very lonely, ethnography for my first book. So this will hopefully be a second book will come out of this new ethnographic study that I'm very excited about.

Stephen 26:29
Finally, just as we close out, what would you say you find most fulfilling about what you do? 

Chiara Galli 26:35
Well, I think the part of my job that I find most fulfilling is really working with students on research. So I love my team ethnography because I get to, you know, work with these young scholars and see how they, you know, blossom in so many ways and like acquire all of these skills. And I learn a lot from them as well.

And I also love supervising students as they come up with their own research. So really the mentorship aspect is the part of the job that I enjoy the most.

Stephen 27:05
Thank you Professor Galli for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's episode, please check out the others. Leave us a comment, like, subscribe, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can learn more about the University of Chicago at uchicago.edu, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.