James Pittman: Welcome to Immigration Uncovered, the Docketwise video podcast where we dive deep into the dynamic world of immigration law, shedding light on the latest developments, cutting edge practice management strategies, and the transformative impact of legal technology. I'm thrilled to be your host on this exciting journey as we empower immigration practitioners with valuable insights and explore the intricate intersection of law and society. And I have today Sharon Abramowitz. She is an anthropologist and professor at Georgetown University, and she is founder of a company called Communatology, which is a consulting firm that specializes in country conditions, expertise, and social science research for use in immigration cases. Sharon, welcome.

Sharon Abramowitz: Pleasure to be here, Sharon.

James Pittman: So could you start by telling us about your academic background? I mean, it's quite impressive, and you have expertise in anthropology, sociology, and a number of other social science disciplines. So how did those interests lead you to become interested in applying this sort of background to the field of immigration?

Sharon Abramowitz: Sure. So, early in my career, I was working in gender based violence in the United States, and I was also working with residential programs for abused teenage girls. So I was really involved in work on trauma and gender. And early on, I made a decision to go to the Peace Corps, and I was assigned to live in a small rural community named Tironiradugu in Kotipoir between the period 2000 and 2002, which happened to coincide with the emergence or the preemergence of the Iborian Civil War. And it was also concurrent with the Liberian Civil War, which was happening in the next country over. So that was a transformative experience for me. I started to think really deeply about the connection between individual mental illness and collective trauma. And when I returned to the United States and I entered a PhD program in sociology at Rutgers University, I had shifted my previous interests, which were focused on gender and political representation in American politics, to international development, with a special focus on peace, conflict, and mental illness and gender. And so during the two years that I was in the PhD program in sociology at Rutgers, I became really involved with medical anthropology, which has places a very deep focus on issues of structural violence, conflict, mental health, and lived experience. And for my dissertation research, I ended up shifting from Rutgers University to Harvard University, where I studied medical anthropology under Arthur Kleiman and Byron Good, who were both renowned medical and psychological anthropologists. And I dedicated my PhD research to returning to West Africa, in particular the countries of guinea and Liberia, to look at how countries put themselves back together after experiencing conflict. Long story short, I spent the next decade working on issues of health and health systems in Liberia and guinea, with a particular emphasis on trauma, mental illness and gender. Right. And then when the West Africa Ebola outbreak emerged, I should also mention somewhere in there I did a postdoctoral training in psychiatric epidemiology at Johns Hopkins. But when the West Africa Ebola outbreak occurred in 2014 to 2015, and I ended up leading a global initiative to bring together social scientists to provide direct response to strengthen the global response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak. And since then, I've been working in my sort of day job, right, as somebody who's seeking to mainstream social science into public health emergency response. Now, concurrently, you can see here that there's a queer intersection between sort of the academic specialization and my desire to have a real impact in the world. I started working informally to act as an expert witness in immigration cases that involved mental illness, gender based violence, and political violence, particularly for people from Cotipoir, Liberia, guinea and Sierra Leone. And I started doing that work around 2014, just writing individual asylum cases as an expert witness, as a country of origin expert witness. And when the pandemic occurred in 2020, 2021, by that point, I had written over 60 country of origin expert cases in the US. Canada, the EU, and the UK. And it became really clear to me that anthropologists and qualitative social scientists more broadly, are really uniquely situated to function as country of origin experts and that we could have an incredibly profound impact on the lives of individual asylum seekers just by explaining not just how things are in their countries of origin, but why they are the way they are. Right. And how that differs from what may be readily apparent in statute or in publicly shared reports or things like that. Right. We have a really intimate understanding of how things work at the household, neighborhood and community level, and we can explain how specific social dynamics result in disproportionate risk for asylum seekers. So at that time, I decided to found communatology and to work on addressing some of the structural barriers that exist between PhD social scientists and immigration attorneys and make it easier for them to connect with each other and for immigration attorneys to use country of origin expert services to know what it is that they're going to get and to train social scientists in doing this kind of work in a way that's useful, legible.

James Pittman: Plausible to it's all.

James Pittman: We're going to dig into a lot of your experiences because they're very impressive and and your story is quite interesting for me, first of all, because I'm very concerned about the state of the immigration system and also because I had a number of back way back when I was practicing. I had a number of West African clients and I actually had handled a lot of these FGM cases and political repression cases from West Africa. So it's all very interesting. Let's dig deeper into some of your experiences. So you worked with the Ebola 100 project and that involved coordinating a vast amount of information. It was a collaborative effort, and you were documenting the Ebola response in West Africa. So how does this experience shape your understanding of the importance of community engagement and local knowledge and humanitarian efforts, which, as stated on your website, are one of the core principles of communatology.

Sharon Abramowitz: So I want to address the Ebola 100 project first, which is very specifically an oral history initiative. And what that was was essentially a collective of practitioners and researchers who wanted to capture what had transpired during the Ebola epidemic in real time. That project, in its current iteration, is now a part of the how to End a Pandemic project, which is based at Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science and Security. And what we're working to do is build a collective archive of pandemic response experiences across all different disease categories so that we can understand what it is that people have learned about stopping the spread of disease and engaging with communities in the context of the disease outbreak in which it occurs and start to improve our ability to just do this work. Right. That was a research initiative that occurred during the West Africa Ebola outbreak, and it involved a large scale coordination of social scientists. My primary role in the West Africa Ebola outbreak was I launched an initiative in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and with key partners in the UK, in Europe and in West Africa that was called the American Anthropological Association ebola Anthropology Initiative. And the goal of that was to mainstream sort of the practical knowledge and the practical understanding of social science researchers into the Ebola response. And I think that what I can really say about that is that what anthropologists are really well situated to do, both in global health and in asylum law, is act as interlocutors between local experience and local communities and in an immigration context. And courts and attorneys, right? Or on the other side, with public health experts, public health practitioners, policymakers, medical professionals, doctors. Right. What we're well able to do is we have a very granular understanding of what life looks like in local communities. And we also have the platform, the voice, and the framework for explaining what life looks like in ways that sound credible and plausible to, frankly, people who are in positions of power. And a lot of times we serve as the agents of communities who are trying to communicate their needs, their capabilities, their priorities, and often are just not being listened to because systems aren't in place to acknowledge the authenticity of their narratives. And fair or unfair, it is true that somebody with a PhD in social science and a long record of peer reviewed publications has greater credibility in the immigration law system than your individual asylum seeker because we are seen as representing science, and in fact, we do represent science. Right? And having the ability to connect lived experience to science and to make that understandable translatable to people who are in really important positions of decision making, it just fills a critical missing gap in the immigration process?

James Pittman: Well, it certainly does.

James Pittman: So let's talk about the concept of Communatology. I mean, it is a startup company. So this is your vision for applying your long history of peer reviewed social science research, turning that into sort of the service that you're providing through Communatology, which is itself a startup company. So let's talk about the concept and mission of Communatology. It is obviously one huge purpose is to provide country conditions, expertise for asylum and other immigration types of cases. And we can talk about what those specific types of immigration cases are where your services would be utilized. But does it have another mission beyond that? I mean, it seemed from the website that you're also advancing humanitarian efforts more generally in other arenas other than the EOIR immigration court system and utilizing your social science research. So let's start with those two questions.

Sharon Abramowitz: Sure. So, very simply, the mission of Communatology is to make the asylum system stronger. Right. The foundation of Communatology is that we believe that asylum is a global good right. And that the system for that immigration systems need to be strengthened and that asylum systems need to be strengthened rather than weakened in the current moment. Right. And one way in which we choose to intervene is by strengthening the use of country of origin expertise in the asylum system, specifically by reducing barriers to the use of that expertise. Right? Yeah. So the way that we reduce barriers is that let's start with the supply side. Right. So the supply side is on the expert. Our current, especially in the United States, in our current expert immigration system, there's really well developed professional networks for financial experts, accountants, medical professionals to serve as country of origin experts. There is nothing like that for social science. Right. There's nothing like that for country of origin expertise. Right. And so that means that the system doesn't actually really know what to do with, you know, a lot of the times attorneys are looking for somebody on the Internet who has some expertise on, say, FGM in Ghana. Right. And they're just trying to find somebody. And the person that they find may have never written an expert report for a court before. They don't understand the basic principles of objectivity legal argumentation. They start to change around the types of questions that are being asked, not recognizing that certain questions tick certain kinds of legal gates that need to be engaged with as you kind of move through the argumentation process. Right. And so what we do is we recruit experts and then we train experts, and we provide resources and templates to experts and review activities and sort of a network to experts so that they can be the best possible witnesses that they can be in a legal context. Right. Which is really important. And we also structure their work in a way that makes it sustainable for them to continue to do this over years and years and years so that they don't get assigned one particular case, completely burn themselves out, potentially go unremunerated or remunerated at too low of a level, and then decide never to do it again. Right. Because we actually believe that an expert witness who's done 60 cases is better than an expert witness who's done three cases. Right. They have better experience at sort of presenting a narrative that's understandable to a court context.

James Pittman: So is it correct, then, that you're recruiting a network of experts who are in a business relationship with Communatology, and then you are providing some amount of systematized training to them about immigration law? And do you have certain guidelines for how, for example, expert affidavits get formulated or formatted? And, I mean, what is the specific guidance that you give them concerning the immigration system and how to apply their expertise in it?

Sharon Abramowitz: Sure. So we have a training process that's part of our onboarding. Right? So at this time, we're about two years old, so to speak. Right. We're a very new startup, right? But at this point, we have just under 60 experts who are permanent consultants on our roster. And when we recruit them, we're specifically looking for a particular profile of expert. They must have PhDs in social science. They must have multiple years of field based experience. They must have language capacity from the country of origin, and they must have a track record of scientifically validated, peer reviewed publication on these particular areas of expertise. Right. So that's who we're looking for. And then what we're doing is, in the context of our training, we explain to them what expert witnessing is. Right. What are the ethical complications that come up as you make a determination about whether or not to take a case or not to take a case and how to present a case and how not to present a case? What are some of the technical considerations that you need to consider as you think about mobilizing strategies for an argument? How do you have an opinion? How do you use first person eyewitness experiences of particular categories of abuse or something like that from your research and weep that into a particular narrative in a way that's honest and persuasive? Right. And really, ultimately, how do you write a report that's either neutral or favorable to an asylum seeker while honoring your primary commitment of being neutral and impartial? Right. How do you serve a court, essentially? And so that's what we provide training in.

James Pittman: Why did you decide to do it as a startup company rather than as a nonprofit organization, and how are you planning to make it work from a business perspective as a company? And what went into that whole process of because you were coming out of academia, I assume there was certain bridges you had to cross to get from your academic experience to being the founder of a startup company in the immigration space. And how did that process play out?

Sharon Abramowitz: My primary professional commitment is to academia. I'm a professor at Georgetown University at the center for Global Health, Science and Security, and I teach and I conduct research in the space of global infectious disease. I decided to establish Communatology as a for profit company, right. In order to have the Nimbleness to be able to build a fully decentralized, fully virtual infrastructure that would enable us to make decisions quickly, to respond quickly to a variety of different kinds of legal environments, to recruit people, to retain people, and to modify our structure as needed as we grew. Right. That being said, we have some basic characteristics that make us look a lot more like an NGO. The overwhelming majority of our resources go back to Compensating, our experts. We operate on an incredibly skinny basis. Right. We have very low overhead. Almost all of that overhead is being used to support virtual capacities. And we're not walking away as a particularly profitable company at this time. Right. We're growing really quickly. In fact, in the space of the last two years, we've completed over 225 cases, which feels like a significant amount of work to have done, starting from, say, zero. Right. But what we're trying to do is build a Nimble light framework that enables us to navigate the immigration space across multiple continents as easily and quickly as possible. Is that the right decision four or five years from now, when hopefully we'll have grown to five times our size? Potentially not. It might be that a B core structure might be more appropriate for us. It could be that an NGO structure could be more appropriate for us. But for right now, having the Nimbleness and flexibility of being a small for profit startup has given us access to a wide range of partnerships, resources, and systems that we otherwise wouldn't have had.

James Pittman: Well, could you share an example of a specific asylum case, maybe, like your prototypical case, where your expertise made, let's say, a pivotal difference?

Sharon Abramowitz: I'll refer to my own asylum casework, if that's helpful. Although I do want to mention that currently our experts represent over 96 countries, so we have a really wide distribution of expertise and thematic areas. As I mentioned earlier, my expertise is in mental health and gender in West Africa. And I'll reference a particular case that occurred, let's say, more than five years ago that came out of the Arizona penal system. There was an individual who was in prison and who had a clear clinical record of schizophrenia. I was asked to come in and address the issues associated with stigma and risk of return for this individual. Right. And there's the usual that you can talk about. You can talk about access to health care systems. You can talk about cultural, religious, and social considerations that people have and how it is that they understand what mental illness is and the ways in which they discriminated against individuals, all of which I did. You can also talk about the risk of destitution that this person faced, the risk of abuse that this person faced, et cetera. But where my expertise became particularly valuable had to do with state protection, right? And state participation in causing harm or failing to protect an individual from harm. And this was tricky, right? Because in principle, there may be some statutes and legislation that offer protection to individuals with disabilities. And so what I was able to do is I was able to explain to the court in oral testimony what it would look like if a group of civilians started to engage in violence towards an individual with schizophrenia on the street and there happened to be police standing by. Right. What would the responsibility and the roles of the police be? Right? And that's something that's really difficult to access from looking at policy documents, from looking at reports, from looking at human rights reports. Right. How does it work out in social life that police could be present at an incident of overt physical harming somebody right. Or like, overt violence and take no action? Right. And I explained how that happens, how that comes to be and what the consequences are within the framework of the Liberian police system. Right. Why it is the previous efforts to prevent the failure of police intervention have not been successful, et cetera. And the result ultimately was a stay of permit ball.

James Pittman: Okay. That's certainly a successful outcome. And the reason why you proceed was the person ultimately eligible or ineligible for asylum?

Sharon Abramowitz: Ultimately they received an indeterminate stay of removal. I don't have further information about the case.

James Pittman: Well, that's very interesting looking sort of broadly. What's your ultimate vision for what impact you hope to make through communatology in the immigration and asylum system as a whole? Just speaking broadly.

Sharon Abramowitz: I would like to see a more formal utilization of country of origin expert witnesses across the US immigration system. Right. As of right now, the US immigration system's approach to using country of origin experts is ad hoc. Funding sources are chaotic. Time frames are all over the place. The process of providing instruction and direction are all over the place. Having a clear understanding on the attorney side right. On the legal side of what it is, the country of origin experts can and cannot do is really poorly defined. And what I would like to see is for country of origin expertise to become a routine part of the immigration and asylum appeals process.

James Pittman: Have you found inconsistencies or what have you found in terms of the vetting and acceptance of country conditions experts testimony by the immigration judges? I mean, do you find them applying inconsistent standards in terms of accepting the testimony or weighting the testimony or what do you think the main issues are there?

Sharon Abramowitz: Very much so. Our immigration experts I'm sorry, our country of origin experts all have reputable academic backgrounds, they all have peer reviewed publications, they all have expertise in the areas for which they're being asked to provide testimony. Where you see this really come up is in the process of WardIR. Right? There's a really wide range of expectations around what constitutes an expert. Right? So for someone like me, who is one of the world's leading experts on mental health in Liberia, I've been challenged in U. S. Immigration Court proceedings about my expertise as an expert on mental health in Liberia because I haven't necessarily been physically in Liberia within the last several years, right. Despite the fact that I've written books about it. I've been asked by the World Health Organization to write the only report on mental health in Liberia that the who has ever, you know, somehow that's not necessarily seen as being sufficient. We've had experiences where Sierra Leonean experts who are political science professors who have done research on political persecution in Sierra Leone and guinea in other countries in West Africa are not recognized for their expertise because there isn't a one to one correlation between a specific peer reviewed publication and the area of expertise on which know providing testimony. In other know, there's an incredibly low threshold that's being applied to the standard of expertise sometimes. I've experienced personally that the court's tolerance for the expression of an opinion has been widely inconsistent. Right. Some courts have a strong preference for just the facts, Jack, and others have really wanted to hear my professional assessment, my opinion, my expert opinion about what the likely outcomes are. And it's really unclear, sort of like, what judges are taking into account when they're sort of like looking at this sort of wide range of interpretive decisions. Right. And I think that, again, what this all comes down to is that it's just not a commonly used resource that has a set of consistent norms and parameters. Right. It's, I think, one of the most powerful tools that you can deploy in explaining to a court what an individual is going to face if they return to their countries of origin, to their homes. Right. And it's essentially a personal Wikipedia for a judge about what this person's likely to face and exactly how it's likely to hurt them. Right. And as long as there's a strong ethic of practice that's being applied by country of origin experts to ensure that, for example, we aren't taking cases that we can't support right. Or that we aren't expressing or really applying any kind of bias in the presentation of our arguments, it can just be an enormous good and there just isn't a clear understanding at this point of how to use that good in the courtroom framework. And I've seen attorneys on both sides really struggle with what to make of country of origin expertise.

James Pittman: I mean, have you found that the judges are content to rely on the State Departments because a lot of time when they're doing the country conditions analysis, background conditions, they're relying on the State Department, they're relying on official reports of other governments. Have you found the attitude, well, that's enough background information, I don't need the extra testimony? I mean, that's one question I have. The other question I have is, are your experts typically going and providing oral testimony and being subject to cross examination, or are you mostly producing written affidavits or both?

Sharon Abramowitz: With regard to the first question, I've never had the experience of my testimony or the testimony of one of our experts being discounted in favor of a government document. Typically what happens is we provide elaboration on a government document. So, again, I'll revert to my experience right. In the annual State Department reports on country conditions in Liberia, on human rights conditions in Liberia, there's often a section that addresses the conditions of individuals with disabilities. And it tends to not be a very long section, tends to be like a few paragraphs or a few pages, and sometimes there's text that says that, generally speaking, the conditions of individuals with disabilities is improving. Right. So what does improving mean? Right? That's where the country of origin expert helps, right? Does it mean that essentially persons with disabilities have gone from being abandoned in the street to be homeless, to experience environmental exposure, to face starvation, and ultimately to die of various medical diseases associated with those things, to that plus having a law that prohibits it? Right? I mean, if that is the condition of improvement, the introduction of a statute or a law, then we have a very clear story to tell about the fact that some things improve and some things don't. And here's what's material for consideration of the risks that face this individual. Right.

James Pittman: Has a situation come up where your testimony contradicts, let's say, what's in the State Department, or you have more recent experience that would tend to contradict or not be fully in alignment with what's in the State Department report? And has that ever become an issue in one of your cases?

Sharon Abramowitz: Sure. Let me address the simpler question first. We do provide oral testimony in US. Court cases. We tend to not be asked to do that in cases in other countries. So we do do work in Canada, the UK, and the EU. And we've even done a number of cases for an asylum organization that's based in Hong Kong. And we've never had to do any oral testimonies for them. But in the United States, our typical presumption is that we will have to provide oral testimony, usually virtually over zoom. And so we do. And yes, we face cross examination. And one of the things that communatology does is it trains anthropologists how to sit through a cross examination as an expert witness right. And how to sort of stay within themselves as a scientific expert who knows their resources and who's facing an adversarial environment, right.

Sharon Abramowitz: So that's one thing that we do and to your next question, which is what do we do when there's a conflict between, say, not necessarily our account and the State Department, but our account and, say, any official record? This is a complicated question, right. And so one of the things that we do is we work really closely with attorneys to make sure that we have a very clear understanding of time frame of location and really specific details surrounding specific events so that we can speak to issues of credibility and plausibility of client narratives. It does occur. Typically we will receive cases on appeal, right. Which means that certain facts have been established. We may receive a case, for example, coming out there was one not too long ago coming out of Central Africa where we were working on a case that involved trafficking and access to healthcare systems. Right. And because we were receiving the case on appeal, the claims around trafficking had been accepted by the previous court and the question of risk of free trafficking and access to healthcare systems had not been accepted. Right. And we were being asked to weigh in specifically on those issues. So if there's precedent in a previous case that essentially accepts certain kinds of claims, we're going to go with a previous decision. Right. If we need to add additional facts, additional context, and even additional new research to address factors that have not been accepted, we will do so. With regard to us. State Department reports, these are incredibly well researched documents, but they're also limited in what it is that they can and cannot say. Right. Like I said. Right. Any small ellipsis, right? Like the conditions for individuals with disabilities in Liberia is improving. What does that mean? Right. And what we're essentially writing is a 1725 page document that explains what that Ellipsis is. What does improving mean? Right. And what does that mean for this person in question? And so instead of contradicting any particular official report or any particular official investigation, usually what we're doing is we're really drilling in and investigating sort of sweeping generalizations in order to give color, context and specificity to this person's story.

James Pittman: Understood? Yes. So almost by necessity, these State Department and other governmental reports which attempt to cover a very wide sweep of description must be they must limit the amount of detail by necessity. So you are able to actually go in and flesh out all of the detail and really provide much more depth on any given point. Which is amazing. We're talking a lot about asylum, but I can think of a number of other types of immigration cases where your expertise would be invaluable. I mean, for example, a cancel of removal case where you're trying to argue for exceptional and extreme and unusual hardship. You mentioned trafficking, a T visa case, perhaps a U visa case. I mean, what are can you give me sort of a rundown of what. The various types of us. Immigration cases are that you've participated in to date?

Sharon Abramowitz: We've participated in all of those. We sort of use immigration and asylum cases as a shorthand, but we're asked to provide country of origin expert reports for all of those applications.

James Pittman: Got you. Okay. Well, by looking at your background, you've dealt with a wide variety of issues, from mental illness to child labor. Are there any common threads as to how you got interested in these various problems? And obviously you are an academic of a particular humanitarian bent, but are there any sort of common threads which led you from one to the other? And how does this variety of humanitarian experiences inform your approach to understanding and advocating for the rights of vulnerable populations, which is obviously a key aspect of Communatology's mission?

Sharon Abramowitz: So I think that your question sort of gives the answer. Right. I'm an academic of a particular humanitarian bent, and having come out of a Peace Corps background, having come out of an anthropology background, I fundamentally believe that communities have an enormous amount of power both to define their futures and define realities and to shape the lived experiences of the people who live within them. Right. And I think that what happens at the community level and what happens at the household level is often poorly understood in policy circuits and policy networks. And so, kind of going back to what I was saying earlier about the role of anthropologists to be interlocutors right. I think that it's incredibly important to understand, both in global health and in immigration law, just what local conditions look like right. And the power of the local in shaping individual experiences and to elevate that to a priority set of considerations in making legal and policy decisions. Right. And so to connect this up, for example, with the global health work that I do at Georgetown, my primary focus at CGHSS, the center for Global Health, Science and Security, is to understand how we are using risk communications and community engagement to prevent, detect, and respond to epidemics. Right. How do we talk to people, and how do we listen to people? Right. And it may seem incredibly naive, it may seem incredibly simplistic, but fundamentally, I think that country of origin experts provide one pathway to listening to people who aren't being listened to in the immigration system.

James Pittman: Well, let's dive into that a little bit. I mean, you've conducted extensive research on topics like health sector capacity in low income countries and gender violence. So I want to talk about the difference between some of the other types of expert witness approaches that are used in immigration proceedings and the kind of approach that you would bring. So I was using the example of female genital mutilation, let's say female Circumcision. You have a respondent who has this claim as part of their case. You would have a physician evaluate them and detail their medical findings. You could have a psychologist evaluate them and give a psychological report. Now, you coming at it as an academician who's a research and academic specialist. How does your evidence based social science research contribute to this process?

Sharon Abramowitz: So we've worked on quite a lot of FGM cases, specifically. And I think that what we need to differentiate here in your question is the difference between somebody who's facing the risk of FGM if they're being repatriated, versus somebody who's experienced FGM and has, for example, experienced, like, medical or psychological sequel. A or they're facing other types of gender based violence that are resultant from having completed an FGM process. For example, forced marriage. Right. And so I can sort of take it in either direction about sort of like how we strategically deal with those two different questions. But I'll start with the second one, right? Like, let's take, for example, somebody who has experienced FGM and who has experienced medical and psychological sequel A for which they are needing or receiving ongoing medical care, right, and intervention, and they are currently receiving social support that's enabling them to rebuild their life. And if they're returned because they've experienced FGM, they're likely to both face medical and physical harms due to lack of access to health care. And they may be at a heightened risk of forced marriage right, because they have been forced to go through a process of cultural initiation that is heavily socially controlled and now their marital rights are being seen as partly the property of the community. Right? So what we would do is we would apply a couple of we would take that in several different directions, right? We would look at the availability of medical, psychological, and social supports for individuals who are being repatriated, who have experienced FGM, and we would give a really reasonable kind of analysis of their ability to access care or not access care. But more importantly, and I think that this is where having a social science perspective is really important, we can explain very specifically how it is that Fatu soro being repatriated to Abijan could potentially come to be found by her prospective in law's family, even though they're 300 miles away. What are the communications networks that would enable her to be findable? Right? What are the systems that would be mobilized in order for her to be tracked down? How would it potentially happen that she could be physically transported from a modern metropolitan area to a rural area in order for her to go under a forcible marriage situation? And what is the real context in the place that she is trying not to be repatriated to of the police or any other sort of government actors stepping in to protect her? Right? And sometimes that means us being able to say, are there NGOs present to prevent this sort of harm? Right? Do those NGOs continue to operate regardless of whether or not they have a website saying that they're operating right. So what we do is we explain how social life works to enable the likely bad thing from happening.

James Pittman: Understood.

James Pittman: You've mentioned that Communatology has experts for it was close to 100. I don't remember the exact number you gave me. Close to 100 different countries. But you have really spent a lot of your effort on Africa, and West Africa specifically. What was it that drew you to that region to focus so much of your energy on?

Sharon Abramowitz: So it was initially happenstance, right. I don't know how many people in your audience are former Peace Corps volunteers, but Peace Corps doesn't necessarily give you an enormous amount of control over where you're placed. And so I was assigned for my Peace Corps service to a rural village in northern Cotivoir right, at the onset of the Ivorian Civil War. And in that location, I came to have a deep, very personal experience of sort of the onset of political violence, the experience of ethnic discrimination. I got to have a very eyewitness, direct experience of what growing militarization of government looks like, what it looks like for rebel forces to start to coordinate and organize. I had soldiers with rifles pull people off of buses in front of me, pull their passports out of their hands and throw them into garbage cans that had fire in them. Right. Like, I actively watched soldiers burn people's identity papers right. In the build up to a civil war. Right. Once you've spent two and a half years living in a community, having a close set of social relations with the people in that community, having friends, knowing kids, watching those kids, watching the little girls in your neighborhood grow up and go through FGM rituals, right? Like, you have a very sort of granular, personal and empathic understanding of what life looks like and how life moves across borders, across political context, across economic contexts. And so once you've had that kind of experience, it's a natural extension to anthropology, which is so focused on understanding people's lived experiences. And so when the time came for me to continue my graduate studies, it just made sense for me to return to West Africa and to really focus on what I wanted to focus on, which was the question of, at the know, the connectionship between the connection between individual and collective trauma. And really broadly, how do countries talk themselves out of war, having talked themselves into one and having been in war for a long period of time, which is a long standing question for me, going back to my previous commitments to understanding individual and societal violence, but also just personally. I'm the child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and my father benefited from favorable immigration policies in the 1950s as he was trying to escape from Poland. That's where I come from, personally.

James Pittman: Well, I saw something in your background which I thought was an interesting tie. And so you did undergraduate at Brandeis University and one of your majors was Near Eastern Judaic Studies, which I thought was interesting. Is there something of, like, Tukun olam or repairing the world and what you're doing? Do you think that's somehow that's in the background as part of your philosophy toward all of this?

Sharon Abramowitz: I think so. And I actually wrote about this a bit in my first book, searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. But honestly, I also think that Takun Alam is just a good handle for having a core commitment to, as you said, being an I was a person with humanitarian commitments. I was a person with a rights based focus. I was a child with a rights based know with a deep sense of identification with oppressed people long before I was a Brandeis student or a Peace Corps volunteer or an academic or global health activist or a human rights actor. Before any of that, I was a daughter and a granddaughter, and I was a kid who would look at stories of human rights violations and I would look at the victims of those human rights violations and I would say, they're just like me. Right. There's no difference between people who find themselves in those situations and me other than just like, a bit of luck. Right. And to the extent that those people get the chance to have their stories treated with as much value as my story would get treated, I think that we have a duty to balance the scales of justice.

James Pittman: Well, let's talk, sir. We absolutely do. And it's very important to remind people of that as we go about doing the work that we do. You had a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellowship focused on epidemiology and mental health outcomes in transnational settings. So that, I imagine, must have been a very pivotal experience. I mean, were there insights that you gained during that fellowship that you applied to addressing the mental health issues within the immigrant and refugee communities that community serves?

Sharon Abramowitz: That's a really interesting question, I have to say. I don't think that that experience necessarily was I don't think that the focus of that experience for me was as much oriented towards sort of thematic content as it was sort of how it is that you connect scales of analysis. Right? So in moving from sociology to anthropology to psychiatric epidemiology, what I essentially learned to do was to learn from thinking about things systematically, to learn to thinking about things both from an experience based perspective and structurally to thinking about things at scale. Right? And so in each one of these sort of steps, I've thought a lot about how you make the truth seeable, how you make the truth knowable. Right? And I think that that actually connects with what it is that we're trying to do at communityology, which is trying to make truth knowable to court contexts in ways that courts can know things.

James Pittman: Understood.

James Pittman: You have a lot of terms here that I think deserve elaboration. Community engagement is something that you refer to on your website. Why don't we talk about what communatology means by community engagement and what do we mean by capacity building? A lot of the work that you're doing, you mentioned having a goal of capacity building and knowledge dissemination. So let's talk about what we mean by these terms.

Sharon Abramowitz: So I will note that there's sort of a technical definition of community engagement which I'm quite familiar with. I was the co author with Jamie Bedson of UNICEF's Minimum Quality Standards and Indicators for Community Engagement, which was completed in, I guess, 2019, 2020, was funded by the Gates Foundation. And so there's a technical definition of community engagement that specifically is focused on engaging in particular practices and methods to enable communities to have a voice in and take control over the events and processes and forces that affect them. Right? So that's sort of the core definition of community engagement. Now, our experts, as social scientists, almost all of them have profiles in both academia and in consulting and within their consulting hats. What they do best is work in a multiscaler way to understand how international, national, and subnational decisions, policies, systems and structures impact local communities and even local households. And they're able to look at that in a wide range of ways, right? They're able to look at specifically how it affects vulnerable populations, like people who are LGBTQ or people who have disabilities or people who have been trafficked, right? I mean, people from different ethnic and religious minorities, right? So their ability to have a very clear understanding of how big forces impact subpopulations and individuals in very real, very tangible ways is what we do. Right? And when it comes to the question of capacity building, often what we're doing is we're working with international organizations, multilaterals nonprofit organizations, local governments, other kinds of governmental organizations like the CDC or the State Department to provide our expertise to help these other bodies understand how to close the right between policy level decisions. Policy know sort of high level, like risk analysis, risk assessments, and the actual real outcomes and the real implications for ordinary people on the ground. What does that look like? It kind of depends on the area that's sort of under consideration. But for example, if we're going to talk about the COVID-19 outbreak, right, there may be a no contact policy, right, whereby door to door information dissemination is banned as part of the national COVID strategy. And yet, because stopping house to house public health outreach activities would result in a radical disruption of health services, the spread of misinformation or disinformation, and really the loss of an entire network of community health workers, those practices persist. Those practices continue. Right? So we end up in situations where persons, community health workers, may be going door to door without adequate resources, face masks, for example, because it's the official policy that they're not going door to door. Right. And what we need to do is we need to stop implementing policy that has blinders built into it, that prevents policymakers from understanding the actual, like the actual world in which people live.

James Pittman: Understood. That's certainly a very illuminating definition. Thank you for that, Sharon.

James Pittman: So, Sharon, our audience is mostly immigration attorneys and as you know, so do you want to share some what you would advise as best practices for immigration attorneys when they are working with country of origin experts like yourself? And also, you may as well tell us what is the process for attorneys to use your services and how should they get in touch with communatology?

Sharon Abramowitz: Sure. Thank you for asking. So first let me say contact us. You can email me directly at SAA at. Communatology co, and we will set you up with all the information that you need and we'll help you find the expert that you're looking for. You can also come to our website, which is WW dot communatology co, and you can learn about our services, you can learn about our experts and start to think about what it is that you need and how it is that we can work together. Broadly speaking, let me just say to your audience, please use country of origin experts in your immigration cases. Right. We may not be necessary at the initial point of contact right. But certainly upon appeal, you should be reaching out to country of origin experts to help strengthen your clients cases. When you do so, it is important to understand the following. We will require from you something that looks like a letter of instruction in which you explain to us clearly what the nature of the case is and what questions it is that you're going to need us to answer. And the better that you explain to us what it is that you need from us, the better it is that we'll be able to tell you whether or not we can help you. Right. Because one of our first principles is that we're not going to use your time and resources if we can't actually be of help. Right. It is a fundamental priority of our organization. Okay. Then you need to understand that this type of work takes some time, that the people who do this kind of work are generally full time employed, and that we're typically going to require, if you want to have a quality product, some period of time, four to six weeks. We have, in fact received requests for large reports that, for example, document the entire history of gender based violence in the country of Botswana in four days. Right. You may be able to find somebody who's willing to do it, and you may be able to find somebody who's willing to do it pro bono, and you may be able to find somebody who's willing to do it in four days. But I can assure you that the quality of the product that you're going to get isn't necessarily going to be any more useful to your client than your typical state Department report. Right? And what we're striving to do here is to give you something that's different from your typical state Department report. We're trying to give you essentially, like I said, kind of the personal Wikipedia for the court about your clients, about the risks that your clients is going to face. And then please understand that we are here to help you use us right, and that we're happy to work with you over the long term through as many cases as you wish to strengthen our ability to work together.

James Pittman: Sharon, thanks so much for joining us. It's really fascinating what you're doing. So, once again, the website is communatology co. It is Sharon Abramowitz, founder. Again, thank you very much for joining us on Immigration Uncovered.

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