The Land of Open Graves: Virtual Talk by Jason De León

Jason De León will deliver a webinar talk on "The Land of Open Graves: Understanding the Current Politics of Migrant Life and Death along the US/Mexico Border."

Jason De León is UCLA Professor of Anthropology and Chicano/a Studies at University of California-Los Angeles, and a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Topic: Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. federal government has relied on a border enforcement strategy known as “Prevention Through Deterrence.” Using various security infrastructure and techniques of surveillance, this strategy funnels undocumented migrants towards remote and rugged terrain such as the Sonoran Desert of Arizona with the hope that mountains ranges, extreme temperatures, and other “natural” obstacles will deter people from unauthorized entry. Hundreds of people perish annually while undertaking this dangerous activity. Since 2009, the Undocumented Migration Project has used a combination of anthropological approaches to understand the various forms of violence that characterize the social process of clandestine migration. In this presentation, the speaker will discuss migrant death in the desert and demonstrate how the post-mortem destruction of migrant corpses creates devastating forms of long-lasting trauma.

The webinar is free and open to the public. Live captioning. Sign-language interpretation provided upon request, subject to availability. Make your request at: https://myaccess.rit.edu.

The event is generously sponsored by: Art Bridges, RIT Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology, and RIT Museum Studies Program.

This talk is offered in conjunction with the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibition, which will run between Oct. 27-Dec. 5 at RIT.
For more on the exhibition and related activities, see: http://tinyurl.com/HTExhibit.