People

LinkedIn Profile

Refugee Resettlement and Adjustment: Dr. Solheim and Dr. Liz Wieling are leading a project that seeks to understand the process of resettlement of newly arriving Karen refugees in Minnesota. They are specifically interested in how refugee families learn about and navigate the complex financial environment in which they now live, and how they experience and cope with stress that comes with these transitions. Learn more at the Immigrant and Refugee Families Center.

Transnational Family Systems: The focus of this area of research is how families build and sustain family relationships across national boundaries. Past work has focused on agricultural workers in Minnesota and their families in Minnesota. Current work examines how families are impacted by deportation.

Global Change, Families, and Communities in Thailand: This work explores the impacts of globalization on families, communities, culture in northern Thailand. Dr. Solheim annually leads a study abroad course that explores issues related to globalization and changing family systems on diverse families in northern Thailand. She makes explicit connections between global and local contexts of Hmong and Karen families living in Thailand and in Minnesota. Students explore issues related to diversity, education, migration, environment, and human trafficking from human ecology and social justice lenses. The course website contains digital stories of student’s learning over the past several years of the course. The Mekong Mosaic is a digital story on vimeo created with Linda Buturian from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction documents earlier work in Thailand.