Colloquium Speaker Series: Cecilia Menjívar - A Continuum of Punishment
When and Where
Description
Thursday October 8, 2020
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
A Continuum of Punishment: Post-Detention Lives of Central American Women Asylum Seekers
Cecilia Menjívar
Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and Professor of Sociology at UCLA President-elect of the American Sociological Association
Cecilia Menjívar (President-elect of the American Sociological Association) is the Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research examines immigration, gender, family, social networks, religious institutions, and conceptualizations of violence in the lives of Central and Latin American immigrants. In addition to many awards, she received the Distinguished Career Award from the Section on International Migration of the American Sociological Association.
Menjívar’s talk is on the vast expansion of the carceral system enveloping ever more immigrants of colour. Based on nearly four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Kansas and interviews of Indigenous Guatemalan women seeking asylum in the U.S., she argues that the asylum system, like the immigration system more generally, has converged with the criminal justice system. The talk, based on a paper with Andrea Gómez Cervantes, is on how the continuum of state control that starts with detention at the border extends beyond detention facilities, accomplished through the vast profiting private prison network.