Transnational Narratives

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

Students’ horizons broaden with research opportunities and study abroad in Costa Rica.

The research of Associate Professor Caitlin E. Fouratt in the College of Liberal Arts’ International Studies department focuses on migration in Central America. Now the Interim Director of the Global Studies Institute as well as the Master of Arts in International Affairs degree program, Dr. Fouratt joined the faculty of California State University, Long Beach in 2014 and was immediately impressed with the students. “My students bring so much into the classroom when I’m teaching on migration that, really, they’re the experts, and I’m just giving them some tools and some language to think about and talk about their own experiences or their families’ experiences,” she says.

Upon joining the faculty, Dr. Fouratt set to work building the university’s study abroad program in Costa Rica, which launched in 2020. Although the pandemic disrupted the program only eight weeks into the first semester, it is now going strong with spots for 25 student participants every semester. Each semester, a different professor in fields such as anthropology and geography leads the program and teaches courses in their discipline that also connect to the host country. Students also take part in Spanish classes and even internships.

Dr. Fouratt is excited to bring her experiences to the Global Studies Institute in fall 2024, to continue prmoting international research and education on campus.

Dr. Fouratt has also brought students to Costa Rica to do field work on her research projects. One of her projects resulted in her book, Flexible Families: Transnational Migration in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, based on her investigation of transnational family relationships among people who have migrated from Nicaragua to Costa Rica for economic opportunities. But her more recent research has focused on a different type of migration as thousands of people have been forced to flee Nicaragua since 2018. In less than a decade, the number of asylum applications that Costa Rica received annually grew from 1,000 to 30,ooo, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recognized the country as receiving the fourth-highest number of asylum applications in the world in 2022.

The huge influx of asylum-seekers has changed the nature of migration in the region and specifically in Costa Rica, and this has changed the focus of Dr. Fouratt’s research. “These families that I had met as transnational families were now refugees, and so these families that had been split across borders were reunited—but only because their college-aged children had to flee rather than be thrown in jail or otherwise persecuted by the government,” she says. She has worked with organizations that include the Costa Rican government to help people navigate the overburdened asylum system and seek aid during the long wait for resolution and, in the meantime, has continued to involve undergraduate students in her
related research efforts.

Dr. Fouratt has worked with students through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), the McNair Program, and the Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Program. Three of these students accompanied Dr. Fouratt to Costa Rica to conduct field work, and two of her recently published papers were co-written with these students. She also notes that two of her students presented at the Latin American Studies Association Conference in 2023; they were the only students on the panel, and both were undergraduates.

Dr. Fouratt has spent 10 years at CSULB creating research opportunities for students in international studies.

One of the papers that Dr. Fouratt wrote with a student focused on the Costa Rican media’s characterization of transit migrants, or those moving through the country, not to the country, from Africa and Haiti. The paper looked at how the media sensationalizes the narrative and creates a discourse of crisis to both make more money and play into political agendas. “You see the same kinds of discourses recycled, even over history,” says Dr. Fouratt. “I have my students analyze political cartoons about immigration in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, and they’re always surprised that the same kinds of things were said about German, Italian, or Chinese immigrants in the 1800s that we hear today about Latin American immigrants, for example.”

Dr. Fouratt seeks to change the narrative through her research. “As an anthropologist, I think it’s about helping people hear their stories,” she says. “I think when we’re shouting statistics and migration rates, and whatever number of asylum applications, people don’t connect with that.” By way of example, Dr. Fouratt relates the story of a couple who witnessed a gang murder in San Salvador. Seventeen-year-old university students at the time, they had less than a week to uproot their lives and escape from threats of violence in El Salvador. They were safer in Costa Rica, but during the six years it took to gain asylum status, they had little access to services and support and could not continue their university studies.

Dr. Fouratt’s student mentorship is also empowering a different media as well as a new narrative. During 2021, she took advantage of the online classroom environment to participate in a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project, which is typically a collaboration between two classes taking place at universities in different countries. But since Dr. Fouratt works with refugee youth who cannot access formal education, the students in her bilingual migration course connected with a network of refugee youth in Costa Rica. The collaborative project that the CSULB students and their international counterparts chose to produce was a Spanish-language podcast that allows the refugees in Costa Rica to tell their own stories. “That was some serious student involvement,” says Dr. Fouratt.