Odessa Gonzalez Benson

Dr. Odessa Gonzalez Benson is an associate professor at the School of Social Work and in urban and regional planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Drawing on social welfare studies and urban studies, her areas of research are: refugee resettlement, state-civil society relations, grassroots migrant organizations, critical policy studies and epistemic justice and knowledge production in social welfare studies and forced migration studies, with three broad aspects to her research. First, she contributes to knowledge about grassroots migrant-run organizations, aiming to inform participatory approaches to social work practice and urban governance. For instance, her studies have examined RCOs’ For instance, her studies have examined RCOs’ organizational legitimacy, crisis response, participation in urban governance, and role in resettlement practices. 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, Gonzalez Benson conducts critical inquiry about knowledge, epistemology, methodology, sociomateriality and theory in social welfare studies and forced migration studies, with past work on migrant ontologies, active strategies in policy research and state violence. This research has been published in journals such as Social Services Review, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Cities, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Refugee Studies, Voluntas and British Journal of Social Work. She draws upon years of engagement with refugee communities, diverse education and work experiences, and her personal path as a 1.5-generation immigrant to inform and motivate her research. She has a Ph.D. in social welfare from the University of Washington in Seattle, an MSW from Arizona State University and a BA in mass communication from the University of the Philippines-Diliman.