Blair Sackett

Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Public Affairs

Blair Sackett is a Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. In a period of rising forced migration, due to war and political upheaval as well as climate change, her research focuses on refugees and the organizational obstacles and opportunities they face in accessing rights and resources. Her first book, "We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America" (University of California Press), co-authored with Annette Lareau, 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. Her second book project examines the reverberations of national policy and humanitarian practice on refugee families’ economic strategies and social networks in a refugee camp in Kenya. Her 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.