When: Thursday, October 10, 2019

Where: Alumnae Hall, Crystal Room

Time: 5pm

Migration@Brown invites you to our first interdisciplinary conversation on migration research in theory and practice with Susan Bibler Coutin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, and Anthropology, University of California—Irvine.

The recent arrivals of Central Americans seeking to enter the United States have been construed as an immigration issue. What if these arrivals were instead understood as bearing histories of violence in which the United States is implicated?

To explore this question, this talk draws on the authors’ engaged fieldwork with Central American immigrants and their allies from the 1980s to the present. It suggests that current conditions forcing Central Americans to the United States are deeply rooted in past political, economic and legal violence. In particular, exclusionary policies have displaced individuals, families, and communities, who in turn have become enclosed within national or other spaces. Sanctuaries and caravans have emerged as a means of challenging spatial necropolitics.