Social Science Research Council

Program Director

holdaway@ssrc.org
Office Phone: ext. 466

Jennifer Holdaway has a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Before coming to New York in 1989, she lived in Taiwan and China for five years, working on European Union development projects, and as a journalist and translator. Prior to joining the SSRC in 2003, she worked at the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, managing research on second generation immigrants and the transition to adulthood funded by the NICHD, the Russell Sage Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and others. She has taught in the political science departments at Brooklyn College and at Barnard College. Holdaway is Program Director for the Migration Program and also represents the Council on projects relating to China. Her work at the Council falls under the following three interconnected themes:

• Development
  Migration and Development. The project is assessing the current state of research on the relationship between various forms of migration and development, and exploring ways to bring the perspective s of the social sciences to an area of enquiry that has been primarily the domain of economics. This work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
  
  Environment and Health in China. This new initiative will review existing knowledge about environment-related health problems and about the response of government and other actors from research inside and outside China. It will consider ways in which research might be more effectively used to address these issues and also identify needs for further research and capacity building in this area. This work is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
  
  
  
• Education
  Education and Migration Working Group. For two years this project has been examining the challenges presented to educational institutions in Europe and North America by the growing number of children of immigrants. Holdaway is currently co-editing two volumes of articles from the project soon to be published as special issues of Teachers College Record. This work is funded by the Mellon Foundation
  
  Children of Immigrants in Schools. an international collaborative research project that examines the impact of cross-national differences in educational institutions, policies, and practices, on the integration of children of immigrants in the United States and Europe. Holdaway is coordinator and also a co-principal investigator on this project, leading a comparison of New York and Amsterdam in collaboration with Maurice Crul at the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation.
  
  In collaboration with the Nuffield Foundation, Holdaway is developing a project that will consider the role of educational institutions in shaping the civic and social inclusion of children of immigrants, and the relationship between schools and immigrant communities around these questions.
  
  Since 2005, Holdaway has also been director of Transitions to College: from Theory to Practice. This program has considered what we know from the various social science disciplines about the factors that shape access to and success in higher education in the United States. The project has produced a set of disciplinary reviews and a policy-oriented report, Questions That Matter. This work has been funded by Lumina Foundation for Education.
  
  
  
• Gender
  The Working Group on Gender and Migration was formed in 2003. Under the leadership of Donna Gabaccia, Katharine Donatao, Martin Manalansan, and Patricia Pessar, the group organized a review of the way in which gender has been integrated into the study of migration in the various social science disciplines. The work culminated in the publication of a special issue of the International Migration Review. This project was funded by the Mellon Foundation. Gender continues to be a cross-cutting theme in Holdaway's work at the Council, with each project considering the ways in which gender relations shape and are in turn shaped by the experience of migration and processes of development.