About

Jean Beaman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her specialization includes the Politics of Identity, International Migration, Race/Ethnicity, and Qualitative Methodologies. She holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in the Department of Political Science. Her academic work focuses on issues related to identity politics, migration, and race/ethnicity, contributing to the understanding of these topics through qualitative research methodologies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Political science
• Geography
• History

Selected publications

• Higher Education as a Danger Zone

  Kalfou A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies · 2026-02-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  On one of my favorite podcasts, Code Switch on NPR, co-host Gene Demby has a catchphrase: “Housing discrimination in everything.” This comes up in episodes dealing with wealth, with education, with policing, and so on. His intelligent and somewhat pithy saying serves to remind the audience of the interconnections of housing discrimination—and therefore racism—with any form of inequality in the United States. I thought of this phrase and this podcast while reading The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth, the brilliant new offering by George Lipsitz, my former colleague at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Given the plethora of ills we presently face, both nationally and globally, it is indeed the right time for such a book. In what follows, after highlighting the takeaways of this rich book, I extend Lipsitz’s lens of the danger zone to the plight of academia, specifically the position of Black women within it.

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• Toward a Black Feminist Reading of Migration

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2026-01-27

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  Abstract This chapter offers a Black feminist theoretical perspective on migration. Black feminism as a theoretical framework offers avenues for better understanding how social location shapes the experiences and trajectories of migrants, particularly those who are racialized minorities. Such a framework emphasizes the role of racism and racialization in shaping the dynamics of migration, as well as how they intersect with gender and sexuality, and structure inclusion and exclusion. This chapter is also in conversation with recent moves in sociology to more intentionally connect analyses of race and racism with the study of global migration. Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of white supremacy in migration studies, including how prior research relied on white normativity in examining the experiences and trajectories of migrants and their descendants.

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• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-12-18

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  Abstract This handbook fundamentally transforms migration studies by centering intersectional approaches drawn from gender, sexuality, and Global South critiques. It challenges the reduction of intersectionality to rhetoric, the neglect of sexuality, and the reproduction of Western-centric knowledge frameworks within migration research. Through a commitment to critical, interdisciplinary, and globally situated analysis, the editors foreground how gender and sexuality are central to migration processes, positioning intersectionality as both an analytical method and political praxis. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of migratory dynamics, analyzing how structural power, institutional practices, and everyday experiences intersect to produce multiscalar inequalities. Contributions extend intersectional analysis beyond core axes of gender and sexuality to include class, race, citizenship, and legal status, drawing on Black, feminist, and queer perspectives, critiques from South-South research, and attention to colonial legacies. Methodological innovation is highlighted, notably in team reflexivity and visual/participatory methods, while policy-oriented sections address intersectional exclusions, climate migration, and governance. Section overviews reveal how intersectionality exposes and unsettles exclusionary categories and simplistic binaries, bringing marginalized voices to the center and advocating for justice-oriented scholarly practices. Rather than a mere compendium, this handbook represents ongoing conversation through challenging dominant migration paradigms, diversifying epistemic perspectives, and advancing a more contextually situated, globally informed understanding of migration, gender, and sexuality.

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• Beyond antiracism

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2025-06-12 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Ain’t I a Migrant?: Global Blackness and the Future of Migration Studies

  International Migration Review · 2024-10-15 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the wake of recent interventions to better connect the subfields of international migration and race and ethnicity through a sociology of racialized immigration, we push this further by arguing for the necessity of a global Blackness perspective on global migration. Such a focus does not just reflect the role of race in the dynamics of migration, and vice versa, but more importantly shifts assumptions about this relationship. So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.

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• The race for theory part II: on race, blackness, and internationalism

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2024-06-10 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Researching racism in racist times

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07 · 1 citations

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  In this chapter, I draw on insights from my many years conducting ethnographic research in France as a Black American and US citizen, and non-French person, to discuss the challenges of conducting research on race and racism in a seemingly colourblind society. I also reflect on my own social location and positionality, which inform both how I conduct my research and how it is received by others, in both France and elsewhere.

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• Migration Studies and Colonialism

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2024-10-29 · 1 citations

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• Review of “An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States”

  Social Forces · 2024-01-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Review of "An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States" Get access Review of "An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States" By Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2022, 284 pages. Price: $37.50 (paper) https://www.russellsage.org/publications/ugly-word Jean Beaman Jean Beaman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, soae005, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae005 Published: 29 January 2024 Article history Received: 06 October 2023 Revision received: 20 October 2023 Accepted: 26 October 2023 Published: 29 January 2024

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• Racial progress amid global state violence

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2023-02-21 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this review, I adapt Meer’s analysis of permanent racial injustice in the Global North to the United States and France, specifically focusing on incidents of police violence against Black populations including the 1992 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, the 2017 beating of Théo Luhaka in Aulnay-sous-Bois, France, and the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I discuss how ideas of forward racial progress permeate the framing of these incidents and the implications of this for present antiracist struggles in both societies.

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Frequent coauthors

• LaShawnDa Pittman-Gay

  Michigan United

  2 shared

• François Héran

  Collège de France

  2 shared

• Catherine Wihtol de Wenden

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  2 shared

• Christine Barwick

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  2 shared

• Anna Lavizzari

  1 shared

• Giolo Fele

  University of Trento

  1 shared

• Waverly Duck

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1 shared

• Nicole Doerr

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Northwestern University

  2010