Quinsaat Secures Grant to Study Conservative Attitudes Among Filipino Immigrants

The American Philosophical Society has awarded Assistant Professor of Sociology Sharon Quinsaat a $6,000 grant for her project, “Understanding Support for U.S. Conservative and Right-Wing Politics among Filipino Immigrants.”

Quinsaat uses ethnography and archival research to examine the emergence, development, and maintenance of conservative and right-wing ideology among Philippine-born individuals in the United States. The project will shed light on growing conservatism among U.S. immigrant groups, which, as the 2020 election shows, is increasingly significant on the local and national scale. This project reflects Quinsaat’s research interests, which include social movements, migration, Southeast Asia, and Asian Americans from a global and transnational perspective. 

The grant will allow Quinsaat to conduct preliminary research in Hawaii, a mixed-partisan state with America’s oldest settlement of Filipino immigrants. Former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family lived in exile in Hawaii after the overthrow of his regime.

This is Quinsaat’s second grant from APS; she received a Franklin Grant in 2019 to conduct research for her first book, Contentious Migrants: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (currently in production with The University of Chicago Press).