Meet the Team

Faculty Lead

Dr. Allan Colbern

Founding Director, U.S. Immigration & Citizenship Lab

Has has fifteen years of experience working with immigrant rights organizations throughout on policy advocacy, capacity building, and coalition building. He serves on the board of the California Immigrant Policy Center and has led in research to strengthen their Regional Capacity Building Project, and he working closely with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice to forge a new coalition to lead in policy advocacy around ending detention and immigration enforcement in California.

Dr. Colbern received the "Emerging Scholar Award" in 2023 from the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association. He is the first author of Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for State Rights in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2021), co-winner of APSA's Migration and Citizenship Section 2021 Best Book Award, and he is the Russell Sage Foundation and Carnegie Foundation’s Presidential Award winner for his second book, "Today’s Runaway Slaves: Unauthorized Immigrants in a Federalist Framework" (Russell Sage Foundation, Forthcoming), featured in his TEDxASUWest Talk, We Have Been Here Before.

Faculty Affiliates and Co-Leads

Dr. Shawn Walker

Dr. Walker is Co-leading multiple projects that combine data science and social science methods with Dr. Colbern and Lab Fellow, which they are using to examine how the news covers and frames immigration politics and (im)migrants, as well as understanding coalition and movements, and legislative politics.

Dr. Walker is a Fellow for New America, an Assistant Professor of Critical Data Studies, and specializes in online activism and social movements. He co-authored of Parler and the Road to the Capitol Attack: Investigating Alt-Tech Ties to January 6, an important rigorous study of Parler that examines metadata for over 13.25 million users and over 1 million video posts to that connects social media activities being linked to political events and demonstrations that led to January 6.

Dr. Natasha Behl

Dr. Behl is Co-leading the (Non)Citizenship project with Dr. Colbern and Lab Fellows, which examines how positivist, interpretivist, and critical methodologies and epistemologies have shaped scholars' concepts of citizenship and citizen/noncitizen and their in/exclusion of marginalized communities.

Dr. Behl the Co-Director of the Social Justice & Human Rights Master's Program, Director of New College Anti-Racism Council (NewARC), and Associate Professor of Political Science at ASU. Her first book, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India (Oxford University Press, 2019), received the American Political Science Association's 2021 Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence.