Migration Stories: Denise Brennan

March 25, 7:30 PM

Via Crowdcast. Watch live and/or pre-register HERE.

This speaker series is co-sponsored by the KU Center for Migration Research.

Denise Brennan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University, and Co-Director of the Gender+ Justice Initiative. Brennan’s scholarship focuses on trafficking, sex work, policing, migration, and women’s labor. Brennan’s most recent book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (2014), examines the connection between undocumented status and exploitation, and how individuals who have endured severe abuse rebuild their lives. Brennan is also the author of What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (2004), which explores how Dominican women use the sex sector strategically to meet tourists and use to their own advantage relationships with men who have come to take advantage of them, in some cases migrating legally off the island through marriage.

Brennan’s current book project, Undocumented: Criminalizing Everyday Life in the United States, explores how 11 million undocumented individuals without immigration protections live everyday with the threat of deportation. It examines how they navigate state surveillance, racial profiling, and the violent possibility of being forcibly removed from their family in their daily lives. The book draws from field research inside the northern and southern “100-Mile Border Zone” as well as migrant communities in the U.S. interior.

Throughout U.S. history, immigration has played a central role in enriching the country's development, yet migrants have repeatedly faced discrimination and controversy over their presence. Forced removal of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and of enslaved Africans from their homelands to the Americas has cast a long shadow over U.S. history. These stories form part of a global narrative in which migration has been a constant, often fraught component of human history. The Hall Center for the Humanities' 2020-2021 speaker series, MIGRATION STORIES, features a range of humanities scholars and writers whose work on immigration, especially the stories of those whose lives have included migration, highlights the continued significance and relevance of the humanities to our contemporary world.