My current research addresses two broad sets of questions: Cultural and Intellectual Inequality and Transnational Social Protection.
Cultural and Intellectual Inequality
I take up these issues through my current book, Move Over Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look at, and Learn and through a new project on Decolonizing Decoloniality.
Decolonizing Decoloniality
Across the world, we hear calls to “decolonize” from many corners. Many focus on making universities, libraries and archives, and museums more welcoming while others address the persistent Western-centricism in environmentalism, humanitarianism, and development aid. This project empirically explores what these projects are actually about in different contexts? What kinds of changes are actually envisioned, who is participating, and whose interests are served? What types of claims and perspectives are subsumed under the chameleon-like call to decolonize?
I take up these questions in several arenas. The first is by co-facilitating a series of conversations organized by the Global (De)Centre about decolonizing in specific national contexts and particular fields. So far, participants from Argentina, Mexico, Angola, Mozambique, Indonesia, Iran, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Georgia have shared their experiences. We have also hosted sessions on decolonizing archives Canada and Belgium, environmentalism, and development assistance. We are currently working on an edited volume based on these presentations.
These conversations confirmed the importance of examining not only how and where theories of post-coloniality and decoloniality circulate, but also the ways in which these theories have been translated into action. There are often stark differences between ideology and practice. We need to actually study how and why these struggles evolve as they do in different settings. We need to also decipher how projects to decolonize universities, museums, and archives compare across former colonial contexts and why. How do they differ in the Francophone, Lusophone, Anglophone, Arabophone, and Spanish-speaking worlds and what does that tell us about colonialism’s lingering footprint? And what about spaces that remain contentious, such as Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Taiwan, where the dynamics of occupation are not necessarily labelled colonial, but where the language of decolonization has also mobilized as a call to action?
Transnational Social Protection: Changing Social Welfare in a World on the Move
In 2022, there were 110 million refugees around the world. In addition, in 2020, there were 281 million people living “voluntarily” outside their countries of origin. These figures don’t include the large numbers of people who move internally, temporarily, or who circulate regularly to work, study, or retire, for short or lengthy stays, without the intention or ability to settle permanently.
In this world on the move, there are increasing numbers of long-term residents without membership who live for extended periods in a host country without full rights or representation. There are also more and more long-term members without residence who live outside the countries where they are citizens but continue to participate in the economic and political lives of their homelands. There are professional migrants who carry two passports and know how to exercise their rights and raise their voices in multiple settings and there are many more poor, low-skilled, and undocumented migrants who are marginalized in both their home and host countries.
This picture raises fundamental questions—which institutions in which countries are responsible for protecting the rights of all these people and where do they fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship? Our traditional narratives about social welfare are that it is something provided by states to their citizens in a single place. But clearly this is out of sync with today’s reality. What’s more, in many parts of the world, the state is dramatically cutting back on or getting out of the social welfare business. Other states were never able to provide what they promised to begin with. In response, a new social welfare regime is emerging that sometimes complements, supplements, or substitutes for social welfare regimes as we know them. Migrants and their families unevenly and unequally piece together resource environments across borders from multiple sources, including the state, market, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their social networks. Local, subnational (i.e., states and provinces), national, and supranational actors (i.e., regional and international governance bodies) are all potential providers of some level of care. Transnational Social Protection is not a cure for inequality. It redistributes rather than eliminates it.
Our book, Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders (co-authored with Erica Dobbs, Ken Sun, and Ruxandra Paul) was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Our research continues as we test ways to adapt our framework and concepts in Latin America and Asia. Articles from a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies apply the TSP framework in East Asia. “Transnational Social Protection: A View from Latin America (with Maria Belen Lopez and Debora Gerbaudo) appeared in Family Policies in Latin America. Springer Publications, 2025.
Peggy Levitt 
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