The Global Border Industrial Complex and the Production of Migrant Vulnerability

This webinar will examine the globalization of migrant vulnerability through the processes of militarization, securitization, and commodification.

Some of the questions that will provide a starting point for conversation:

  • What are the patterns of migrant vulnerability that you are seeing in the areas where you have done your research?
  • What role have processes of militarization, securitization, and/or commodification played in your analysis of the social forces responsible for the vulnerabilities faced by migrants? 
  • How have you conceptualized structural violence in relation the processes of militarization, securitization, and/or commodification?
  • What are the most important emerging trends that you see in the globalization of border control regimes? 
  • What are the most important questions that we should be asking about human rights and social justice in relation to these emerging trends?
  • What are the emergent forms of resistance and/or social mobilization and organization against these regimes of border control that we should be paying attention to?

 

Srteaming Link
https://arizona.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=a36e0835-2868-4924-9cc7-23450c9c5221

Victor Braitberg and William Simmons, University of Arizona

Participants

  • William Simmons

    University of Arizona

    William Paul Simmons is Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Honors Interdisciplinary Faculty at the University of Arizona. His research is highly interdisciplinary; using theoretical, legal, and empirical approaches to study social justice and human rights issues.

  • Ruben Andersson

    (London School of Economics, Department of International Development

    Author of Illegality Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe

  • Raquel Rubio Goldsmith

    University of Arizona

    Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, MA&RS adjunct lecturer, specializes in research and teaching on Mexican-American women’s history, human rights, and immigration issues. A native of Douglas, Arizona, Rubio-Goldsmith completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in Law and Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has taught at Pima Community College since 1969 and, since 1983, at the University of Arizona, where her primary focus has been the history of Mexicanas and Chicanas. She has taught courses on Mexican and Latin American history as well as developed curricula on Afro-American, Yaqui and Tohono O’odham histories. Rubio-Goldsmith has won numerous awards for teaching excellence. She has presented papers on Mexican women on the U.S.-Mexico border, a subject she has studied for many years, before national and international conferences, and published the results of her research in several scholarly articles. Rubio-Goldsmith is currently researching for a book on women who fled the Mexican Revolution to take refuge in Southeastern Arizona. Students and colleagues know her as a community activist devoted to immigration rights, women’s rights, and civil rights in general. As a member of several community boards and as a public speaker she constantly presents a Chicana perspective. Since 1994 she has been active in providing information on the Zapatista Revolution in Mexico through Pueblo Por La Paz in Tucson, and the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico.

  • Todd Miller

    Todd Miller currently writes on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas. He has researched and written about US-Mexican border issues for over a decade and has worked for BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona, and Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. His first book, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, was published by City Lights Publishers in 2014.

Victor Braitberg

 Victor Braitberg is a Cultural Anthropologist whose research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology and Science and Technology Studies. His work is broadly concerned with the ethnographic and historical study of the ways that biomedical knowledge and technological practices are used as political and ideological resources for mediating social inequalities. For the last 13 years he has studied how information and communication technologies are used to mediate health care inequalities in the United States. Since 2003, his research on telemedicine has traced the linkages between the medical field, telecommunications, defense, and aerospace industries, and government policies to address issues of access to health care for poor and marginalized communities. Dr. Braitberg is especially interested in working with graduate students and advanced undergraduates who are interested in the history and ethnography of Western medical systems, the health professions, and the politics of expertise.

https://honors.arizona.edu/person/victor-braitberg

More information

More information

Comparative Immigration Unaccompanied Child Migration–Issues in the Immigration Courts Women and Immigration

Annotated Bibliography

  • Migration Policy Institute, Border Security Page: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/border-security
  • Outsourcing European border security – ‘at the whim of foreign dictators’? https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/opinion/stop-outsourcing-european-border-security/
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