CRS Seminar: Children’s rights across borders: Precarious Protections and Drawing Deportation in conversation
November 15, 2023
12:30 – 2:00pm
Zoom link: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/91628478995?pwd=WkNyWE5tNmZ6LzU3VmN3SElOamp3UT09
Speakers: Chiara Galli, Silvia Rodriguez Vega & discussant (TBC)
Moderator: Christina Clark-Kazak
Abstract: Children and young people under the age of 18 have specific rights and protections, codified in domestic and international law. However, when they cross international borders, especially when they or their family members are undocumented, these rights and protections are not always safeguarded. This facilitated discussion brings in conversation authors of two recent books on unaccompanied minors and family separation in the United States: Chiara Galli’s Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the US and Silvia Rodriguez Vega’s Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children. This wide-ranging discussion will touch on methodology, criminalization of migration, and children’s resistance and resilience.
Chiara Galli is Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California Los Angeles in 2020 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell from 2020 to 2022. She studies Latin American migration to the US, focusing in particular on the experiences of children and asylum-seekers, on how immigration policies shape migrants’ lives, and on the role of non-profits and volunteers in managing migration. She is the author of the book, Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the United States (University of California Press. 2023), an ethnographic study that chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Currently she is working on two studies. First, with the support of the American Bar Foundation’s Access to Justice Scholars Program and in collaboration with Dr. Tatiana Padilla (Boston University), she is studying access to legal representation and determinants of case outcomes for unaccompanied minors in the U.S. immigration court using a large administrative dataset. Second, with a team of research assistants, she is conducting an ethnographic study on the reception of asylum-seekers in Chicago.
Silvia Rodriguez Vega is a community engaged writer, artist, and educational practitioner. She is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Chicana/o Studies. Her research explores the ways anti-immigration policy impacts the lives of immigrant children through methodological tools centering participatory art and creative expression. Before joining UCSB, Rodriguez Vega was a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University in the Department of Applied Psychology. She received her PhD from UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. Her first book, Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (NYU Press, 2023) argues that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies.
Book Title & Abstract:
Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (NYU Press, 2023) argues that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in two different border states—Arizona and California— Drawing Deportation gives readers a glimpse into the lives of immigrant children and their families. Through an analysis of 300 children’s drawings, theater performances, and family interviews this book at once devastating and revelatory, provides a roadmap for how art can provide a necessary space for vulnerable populations to assert their humanity in a world that would rather divest them of it.
Christina Clark Kazak
