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This is an entertaining and powerful book on Filipinos living in the United States and the Netherlands, full of wonderful conversations, but it also shows how we all put bits and pieces of meaning together from many sources to craft a world and our identity in it. Specifically, Quinsaat shows how immigrants become a self-conscious diaspora through activism, which has never been a more important question than it is today.
James M. Jasper Author of The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements
Insurgent Communities is a book I could not recommend more. It is a brilliant sociological study on the political activism of Filipinos inside and outside of the homeland. A must-read for scholars of migration and social movements, it illustrates how a diaspora is not just a shared identity, but instead a political accomplishment.
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas Author of Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States
Joining theories of migration and social movements, Insurgent Communities explores how diasporic identities are politically made and remade. Anti-Marcos insurgents had to convince Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands that loyalty to the Filipino nation required opposition to the Philippine state, and Sharon Quinsaat’s account of how they did that is compelling.
Francesca Polletta Author of Inventing the Ties that Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life

Sociologist of Migration and Social Movements

I am a scholar of social movements and migration and currently Associate Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College. I have conducted research using both qualitative and quantitative methods on a wide range of topics, including migrant conservatism, diaspora formation, transnational repression, news frames and discourses on immigration, women’s international nongovernment organizations, coalition-building in the World Trade Organization, and movement against free trade. My first book Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (University of Chicago Press, 2024) shows how diasporas emerge through political activism.

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