11/03/2026
By Karen Mullins

The School of Criminology and Justice Studies is proud to announce a dissertation defense by Catherine Stevens, titled “Through Every Conceivable Condition: A U.S. Refugee Resettlement Organization Persisting and Evolving Under Chronic Federal Policy Volatility - A Constructivist Grounded Theory Study."

Details

  • Date: Monday, Nov. 16, 2026
  • Time: 10 a.m. – noon
  • Location: HSS 342
  • Zoom:Join via Zoom

Committee members

  • Jason Rydberg, Ph.D., Chair, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  • A Horning Ruf, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  • Neil Shortland, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  • Thomas Piñeros Shields, Ph.D., Salem State University

Abstract

Between 2017 and 2026, federal refugee resettlement policy shifted direction through three distinct administrations, each one reshaping the ground beneath frontline organizations. This study examines how one of them not only survived it but evolved within it. It does so through a single Northeastern U.S. resettlement organization, using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) to trace what sustained operation actually required. Drawing on 26 semi-structured interviews with current and former staff — approximately 25% of eligible employed staff — and 25 hours of focused ethnographic observation, the data were analyzed through initial, focused, and theoretical coding, generating a Basic Social Process: Persisting and Evolving Through Chronic Volatility, mapped across two analytical levels, four categories, and three consequence pathways.

The results reveal an organization operating within two layers of constraint — a fixed structural ceiling built into the resettlement system's design, and an operational space that shifted with federal policy direction — navigating through four interdependent processes: Grounding, Absorbing, Shouldering, and Acting. Crucially, repeated disruption did not merely deplete the organization. Through the Capacity Building Cycle, each crisis encoded learning that deepened organizational capacity before the next one arrived. But that evolution came at a cost: frontline staff bore what the organization could not contain. Moral shouldering, compliance burden, and structural foreclosure of relational work were persistent features of frontline experience — not episodic ones.

The findings challenge existing accounts of organizational resilience, street-level bureaucracy, and individual coping under sustained political pressure, offering an integrated framework that tracks how pressures and costs move between organizational and individual levels simultaneously.