​Elcioglu, Emine Fidan. 2025. “Seeding the Divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club, and the Struggle Over U.S. Environmentalism.” Race and Class. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968251371957

I revisit the Sierra Club’s internal fights over immigration. Some watchdog groups frame the controversy as a far-right infiltration, while critical race scholars see exclusion as inherent to environmentalism. Drawing on archival records, I argue instead that restrictionism grew out of the Sierra Club’s own ambivalence. By sustaining a technocratic middle ground that rejected both overt xenophobia and systemic critique, the Club created a vacuum in the 1970s and 1980s. John Tanton, attuned to these hesitations, used them as openings to build an restrictionist infrastructure from within. That infrastructure proved powerful enough to shape the Trump administration's immigration policy today. This history shows that environmentalism has always been a terrain of struggle, marked as much by missed opportunities as by exclusionary turns. 

Elcioglu, Emine Fidan. 2025. “Red Pills, Blue Books: How YouTube and Social Science Courses Compete to Shape Political Consciousness of Youth.” Critical Sociology. 

Where do young people get their political ideas? This article builds on my earlier research with second-generation Chinese and South Asian Canadians, where many turned to conservative ideas as a way to claim dignity and belonging. In this new study, I ask why some students see power as structural while others view it as personal or cultural.  I show how conservative influencers on YouTube provide emotionally charged common sense, while classrooms in the social sciences offer tools for structural critique. The clash between these two spaces reveals how fragile critical education has become under digital capitalism.  A public-facing version appeared in The Conversation, where I also expanded on the decline of progressive institutions beyond the university, from unions to political study circles.

​Elcioglu, Emine Fidan. 2023. "Armed Citizens on the Border: How Guns Fuel Anti-Immigration Politics in America." Social Problems 72(3): 1043-1058.
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What do guns have to do with immigration politics? This article shows that, far from being props, firearms are the glue that sustains nativist organizations that operate at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic research, I reveal how gun shows and shooting ranges double as recruitment hubs, and how the thrill of handling firearms keeps activists engaged even when they know their desert patrols won’t “stop the border.” By tracing these connections, the piece argues that America’s settler-colonial legacy continues to entwine gun culture with nativist politics.

​Here me discuss these findings on This is Hell Podcast (2023) and Guns Unpacked Podcast (2025). You can also read about my findings on The Trace, an independent investigative outlet dedicated to issues related to gun violence.

Emine Fidan Elcioglu and Tahseen Shams*. 2023. "Brokering Immigrant Transnationalism: Remittances, Family Reunification, and Private Refugee Sponsorship in Neoliberal Canada." Current Sociology. 72(5): 890-908.. *equal co-authors

Much scholarship celebrates immigrant transnationalism as a story of refugee agency, portraying cross-border ties as self-directed acts of resilience. This article complicates that view by showing how Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program empowers ordinary citizens—often with no refugee background themselves—to broker, and sometimes constrain, refugees’ connections abroad, encouraging family reunification while discouraging remittances. By revealing how “care” becomes a site of control, the piece unsettles the assumption that transnational practices are driven solely by migrants or refugees themselves.

​Elcioglu, Emine Fidan. 2021. "Neoliberal Fatigue: The Effects of Private Refugee Sponsorship on Canadians' Political Consciousness." Critical Sociology 49(1): 97-113.

​Canada’s much-lauded private refugee sponsorship program invites ordinary citizens to step in where the state steps back. Drawing on interviews with sponsors, this article shows how well-meaning volunteers witness the struggles of refugees yet become consumed by the exhausting, individualized tasks of resettlement. Rather than sparking critical awareness of systemic inequality, these demands produce what I call neoliberal fatigue: a weariness that normalizes structural gaps by turning them into personal problems to solve. The result is a sobering look at how humanitarian good intentions can end up reinforcing the very system they aim to challenge.

Elcioglu, Emine Fidan. 2015. “Popular Sovereignty on the Border: Nativist Activism among Two Border Watch Groups in Southern Arizona.” Ethnography 16(4): 438-462.

Often dismissed as “vigilantes,” Arizona border militias actually see themselves as partners of the state. This article shows how two such anti-immigrant groups both rely on and reinforce government power: patrolling with Border Patrol or designing surveillance tech for the Department of Homeland Security. Their story complicates the line between anti-state rebellion and state-making.

Elcioglu, Emine Fidan. 2010. “Producing Precarity: The Temporary Staffing Agency in the Labor Market.” Qualitative Sociology 33: 117-136. 

​Producing Precarity reveals how temp agencies don’t just place workers in jobs; they actively manufacture insecurity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how agencies sort workers into a valued “core” and a disposable “periphery,” capping mobility and intensifying surveillance. Precarity, I argue, is not an accident of the labor market but its business model..