Past Event

In this book presentation, Dr. Margaret Dorsey and  Dr. Miguel Díaz-Barriga take as their starting point how the global proliferation of border walls imprison the citizens that they are built to protect and reinforce racism within the nation’s boundaries.  The authors examine border wall construction not only in terms of violence at borders aimed at migrants but also in terms of the devolution of democracy and citizens’ rights within nation-states “protected” by walls.  A special focus of the talk is how construction of the U.S. Mexico border wall has unleashed practices associated with necropower and necrocitizenship on the U.S. side of the border.

Dr. Margaret Dorsey is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Richmond. She was a Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) as well as founding curator of UTRGV’s Border Studies Archive. She was named an Ethel-Jane Westfeld Bunting Fellow at the School for Advanced Research. Dorsey has published numerous articles and invited chapters on citizenship, borderlands music and politics.  Her book-length projects include Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing (2006), Linda Escobar and Tejano Conjunto Music (2013) and with Miguel Díaz-Barriga Fencing in Democracy: Border Walls, Necrocitizenship and the Security State (2020).

Dr. Miguel Díaz-Barriga is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Richmond. He authored numerous publications on Mexican American Culture, Visual Anthropology, and Border Security. During the 2014-2015 academic year, he was awarded the Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College. He was also named an Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Fellow at the School for Advanced Research. His essay co-authored with Dr. Margaret E. Dorsey, “Filling in the Gaps: Walls Without Limits, Sovereignty with Exceptions,” won the best conference paper award at the Association for Borderlands Studies 2018 international meeting.

This event is organized by Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Migration & Diaspora Studies, and the Department of Geography.