Odessa Gonzalez Benson

Dr. Odessa Gonzalez Benson is an associate professor at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research are refugee resettlement, state-civil society relations, critical policy studies (US refugee policy) and epistemic justice, with three broad areas. First, she examines grassroots refugee-led organizations (RLOs), within a multi-scalar, contested institutional domain. For instance, she has work on RLOs as ‘shadows of the shadow state’, and their organizational legitimacy and roles in resettlement practices. A new line of study explores the materiality and local-distal relationalities of refugee-led organizations. Second, in her critical policy studies, she examines various aspects of U.S. refugee policy, including refugee placement strategies, work policies and neoliberal discourse, using varied methodological approaches, from quantitative analyses of federal data to discourse analyses of historical text. Finally, she interrogates epistemic justice and knowledge production in social welfare studies and forced migration studies, with work on migrant ontologies, active strategies in policy research and state violence, for example. This research has been published in journals such as Social Services Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Voluntas and Cities. She has a PhD in social welfare from the University of Washington, an MSW from Arizona State University and a BA from the University of the Philippines-Diliman