Immigration & Asylum Inside and Outside the Classroom

Co-Chairs

Rebecca Galemba (University of Denver), Lisa Martinez (University of Denver)

To participate:

Please send a short paragraph stating why you are interested in the panel and what you would expect to contribute/discuss by October 16. We will then make decisions by October 20th, giving enough time to submit by October 24.

Please email to Rebecca.Galemba@du.edu and Lisa.Martinez@du.edu

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This roundtable convenes legal, social science, and humanities scholars collaborating with immigrant-serving organizations or communities on issues of border enforcement, detention, immigrant policing, the U.S. immigration court system, crimmigration, and asylum in the United States through their research, teaching, and/or community engagement. Since at least the 1980s, academics have collaborated alongside attorneys, legal aid organizations, non-profits, member-based activist groups, and immigrants to advance the struggle for immigrant rights. More recently, scholars from multiple disciplines have also initiated service-learning, or community-engaged, classroom and clinical experiences that seek to directly involve students. Collaborations may include volunteer opportunities like providing rides or meals, translation, accompaniment to court dates or immigration check-ins, direct social, mental health, or legal services, or research-based partnerships. However, the extent to which such collaborations are long-lasting, community-initiated or led, and encourage students and faculty to reflect on their own identities and the associated power dynamics has varied. Similarly, while activist scholars have made headway in theorizing accompaniment (see Yarris and Duncan forthcoming; Nuñez-Janes and Ovalle 2016; Abrego 2021), complicity (Gomberg-Muñoz 2018), fugitivity (Rosas 2018), and potentialities for decolonizing engaged research with undocumented populations and activists (Bejarano et al. 2019), theoretical discussions continue to be largely siloed from analyses that interrogate the power dynamics of community engagement (Janes 2016) and the student experience (e.g., Camacho 2004). There has also been little comparative analysis regarding how particular disciplinary cultures, departmental reward systems, institutional resources and structures, funding availability, and reception contexts make certain collaborations possible, more pressing, or inhibit them. We ask, how can academic programs dedicated to clinical training, law, or service-provision work alongside those more focused on theory generation, language mastery, or teaching students more basic versus advanced understandings of the social dynamics of (il)legality, law, immigration, and asylum? This session invites participants to examine the ways that theory, student learning, critical reflexivity, and advocacy inform, as well as challenge, one another. We further ask: What is the value of academic partnership and knowledge in agitating for local-level changes in immigration policy amidst federal intransigence?

Goal:

The longer-term goal will be to author an edited volume to inform such collaborative endeavors, classroom service-learning partnerships, and a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between immigration policy, law, advocacy, activism, research, and teaching (and include students and community partners in the writing process). Contributions should not only thematically deal with the topics of immigration and asylum, but also critically and reflexively engage with teaching, student mentorship, practice or service-provision, community partnerships, volunteer or activist work, or other forms of accompaniment, testimony, policy work, or advocacy.