Citizenship and Family: Revisiting Dred Scott

This Essay explores the implications of the Dred Scott case for modern questions about family unity as it is affected by U.S. immigration law and policy. Part I elaborates on Dred Scott’s story, illustrating the central role that family unity played in the case. Part II focuses on the arc of history as it extends from Dred Scott to the present, demonstrating that the historical narrative of the Dred Scott case has often been used as a rallying cry for thicker, more robust conceptions of citizenship and for “equal citizenship.” Part III argues that, when it comes to the right to family integrity, a contemporary re-reading of the story of the Dred Scott family and a reexamination of the legacy of the Dred Scott decision might actually favor a decoupling of the right to family integrity and the rights associated with formal citizenship. In lieu of a more robust definition of citizenship that encompasses the right to family integrity, perhaps the Dred Scott case and its aftermath counsel us to move toward a more human-rights centered definition of the right to family integrity, applicable to all persons subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Part IV concludes that a broader understanding of the right to family would require revisions to certain components of U.S. immigration laws that pose clear, and sometimes unnecessary, barriers to family integrity

Navigating Liminal Legalities Along Pathways To Citizenship: Immigrant Vulnerability and the Role of Mediating Institutions

In this report, we summarize the findings of research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and conducted in Southern California over the course of eighteen months between January 2014 and September 2015. This time period coincided with the announcement of and subsequent legal challenges to the DACA and DAPA program – a period characterized by extreme legal uncertainty over the availability and scope of these “Executive Relief” programs. Drawing from 16 in-depth interviews with staff of 10 different immigrant serving organizations and 47 interviews with noncitizens in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas, we captured the on-the-ground challenges facing noncitizens and community based organizations as the scope and availability of Executive Relief was debated. In our research, we focused on the hardships and barriers to incorporation imposed by liminal legal status, the challenges faced by organizations mediating between their constituents and the state in periods of legal uncertainty, and the ways that uncertainty has reshaped the social, political and legal environment in which immigrant-serving organizations and their constituents interact. Our research is ongoing, but here we offer our preliminary findings for some of our research questions

The Match File Format: Encoding Alignments Between Scores and Performances

This paper presents the specifications of match: a file format that extends a MIDI human performance with note-, beat-, and downbeat-level alignments to a corresponding musical score. This enables advanced analyses of the performance that are relevant for various tasks, such as expressive performance modelling, score following, music transcription, and performer classification. The match file includes a set of score-related descriptors that makes it usable also as a bare-bones score representation. For applications that require the use of structural score elements (e.g., voices, parts, beams, slurs), the match file can be easily combined with the symbolic score. To support the practical application of our work, we release a corrected and upgraded version of the Vienna 4x22 dataset of scores and performances aligned with match files

Partitura: A Python Package for Symbolic Music Processing

Partitura is a lightweight Python package for handling symbolic musical information. It provides easy access to features commonly used in music information retrieval tasks, like note arrays (lists of timed pitched events) and 2D piano roll matrices, as well as other score elements such as time and key signatures, performance directives, and repeat structures. Partitura can load musical scores (in MEI, MusicXML, Humdrum **kern, and MIDI formats), MIDI performances, and score- to-performance alignments. The package includes some tools for music analysis, such as automatic pitch spelling, key signature identification, and voice separation. Partitura is an open-source project and is available at https://github.com/CPJKU/partitura/