The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (HGF) is pleased to invite you to our upcoming Knowledge Against Violence Speaker Series session. The HFG Speaker Series is a virtual forum for an informed audience to learn about timely research and analysis from leading violence experts and is open to the public.

Featuring examples from Pakistan, Brazil, Ecuador and South Africa, this discussion will complicate our understanding of gangs. From violent criminal behavior to service provision and community legitimacy, this panel will explore the sometimes paradoxical role of urban gangs and offer suggestions for mitigating the violence they inflict.

Speakers Include:

- David Brotherton | John Jay College of Criminal Justice
- Nicholas Barnes | University of St Andrews
- Adeem Suhail | Franklin and Marshall College
- Rosette Vuninga | University of the Western Cape

Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully.

As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to this vibrant anthology, Migration and Mortality, examine restrictive immigration policies and the broader capitalist systems of exploitation and inequality while highlighting the power of migrants’ collective resistance and resilience. 

The case studies in this timely collection explore border deaths, detention economies, asylum seeking, as well as the public health and mental health of migrants. Ultimately, these examples of oppression and survival contribute to understanding broader movements for life and justice in the Americas

Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment takes a critical, interdisciplinary, and transnational look at current issues surrounding immigration in the U.S. and abroad. It seems to problematize the age of punishment that currently reigns over borders and those who seek to cross them.

The second installment of the of the Social Anatomy of a Deportation Regimes Critical Border Studies Book Talk series will be taking place on Thursday, October 17 at 6:00pm at the John Jay Sociology Lounge. Award winning investigative Journalist Todd Miller will be presenting on his book "Empire of Borders".

Miller has written and researched about border issues for more than 15 years, including throughout Latin America and the world. His latest book "Empire of Borders" traces Washington's policy of pushing back of the US border into the interior of Latin America (and indeed the world) as a fundamental technique of US Imperialism through in depth investigative reports from Guatemala to the Philippines to Palestine. In this talk Miller will present his findings from this book and the broader implications for the current migrant crisis at the border as it is shaped by the vested interests of the shadowy US border security industry.

On September 26, at 6:00pm in the Sociology Lounge, Professor Nancy Hiemstra of Stony Brook University will be presenting her latest book "Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime".

This is the first installment of the Critical Border Studies book talk series, organized by the Social Anatomy of a Deportation Regime, a research working group which focuses on border and immigration enforcement, crimmigration and immigrant rights movements. Over the course of the fall semester key scholars and writers concerned with the issues surrounding the US border will present their work to students and faculty interested in this growing field of study.