Thursday, March 7th
Noon to 1:30pm | PUB NCR

Zoom option available: ewu.zoom.us/j/82411008097

Some eleven million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, carving out lives amid a growing web of surveillance that threatens their and their families’ societal presence. Asad L. Asad’s book Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life examines how undocumented immigrants navigate complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins.

Asad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials, to offer a rare perspective on the surveillance that undocumented immigrants encounter daily. He describes how and why these immigrants engage with various institutions—for example, by registering with the IRS or enrolling their kids in public health insurance programs—that the government can use to monitor them.

This institutional surveillance feels both necessary and coercive, with undocumented immigrants worrying that evasion will give the government cause to deport them. Even so, they hope their record of engagement will one day help them prove to immigration officials that they deserve societal membership.

Asad uncovers how these efforts do not always meet immigration officials’ high expectations, and how surveillance is as much about the threat of exclusion as the promise of inclusion. Calling attention to the fraught lives of undocumented immigrants and their families, this superbly written and compassionately argued book proposes wide-ranging, actionable reforms to achieve societal inclusion for all.

Author Bio: Asad L. Asad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He studies how citizenship and legal status matter for multiple forms of inequality. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life.

Thursday, February 29th
Noon | Join us via Zoom

In my book, Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities and Culture from Houston to Accra, I examine the diverse cultural and transnational strategies through which Ghanaians position themselves as citizens of the world.

The Afropolitan is a politic, identity, and aesthetic that insists on elevating Africa’s place on a global stage. Afropolitan Projects demonstrate how a politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality shape the way an increasingly class-privileged cohort of Africans connect with others on the continent and in the diaspora.

In this presentation, I have three aims:

• First, I outline how immigration policies such as the U.S. Diversity Visa Program and African national contexts such as state failures and access to higher education have shaped the emergence of this “new” African diaspora.
• Second, focusing on the politics of return, global anti-blackness, and anti-queer movements, I illuminate some of the political contests that inform Afropolitan projects in the African diaspora.
• Third, I provide an analysis of what this context and contests offer by way of transnational connections and diasporic solidarity.

Through this analysis, I invite audiences to consider how Afropolitan Africa as a contemporary Black diasporic site presents opportunities and pitfalls in the struggle for Black liberation.

Author Bio: Anima Adjepong is the author of Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities and Culture from Houston to Accra, founder of Silent Majority, Ghana, a nonprofit that engages indigenous Ghanaian knowledge and collective organizing to champion queer freedom in Ghana, and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati.