Bio
Born and raised in Bogotá, Carolina Alonso Bejarano is a community organizer, writer, editor, translator and DJ. She is an Assistant Professor of Law at Warwick University, and she holds a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research interests lie at the intersection of decolonial feminism and migration studies, particularly as it relates to interethnic immigrants’ rights activism in the United States. She is the author of Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019), a collaboratively written book that explores the immigrants’ rights movement in New Jersey and the possibilities of using ethnography as a tool for decolonization. She is a collective member of Sangría Editora, a publishing house based in New York City and Santiago de Chile, and in her spare time she mixes music and practices poi in hopes of one day becoming an awesome fire spinner
Abstract
“Ningún Ser Humano es Ilegal: Decolonial Feminisms & Immigrants’ Rights Grassroots Organizing in New Jersey” is a feminist decolonial study of the immigrants’ rights movement in Freehold Borough, NJ. As an interdisciplinary project, the dissertation draws on multiple methods –primarily archival research, oral history and four years of ethnographic fieldwork– and argues for the use of dehumanization rather than illegality as a framework for understanding the debate around undocumented immigration in the United States.
