When
Lecture: Wednesday, March 19, 2 pm - ENR2 Building, Room S107 - University of Arizona
Free Event, no registration needed - Reception with refreshments will follow
Graduate Seminar "Methods and Meanders: A Conversation on Ethnographic Approaches", Thursday March 20
By registration - Details to follow soon
The Southwest Center invites you to the 2025 Bazy Tankersley Southwest Laureate Lecture, featuring Barbara Sostaita. She will share her work Sanctuary Everywhere, which explores the power of sanctuary at the Sonora-Arizona borderlands, weaving together fieldwork and personal experience as a formerly undocumented immigrant. An Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, Barbara offers a deeply compassionate perspective on migration, refuge, and resistance. Join us for a compelling, necessary discussion on the meaning of sanctuary in the crucial times ahead.
Dr. Sostaita reimagines practices of sanctuary along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to explore the possibilities for radical fugitivity in the face of militarized border enforcement. After the 2016 presidential election, churches, universities, cities, and even states began declaring themselves sanctuaries. Sostaita proposes that these calls for expanded sanctuary are insufficient when dealing with the everyday workings of immigration enforcement. Through fieldwork in migrant clinics, shelters, and the Sonoran Desert, Sostaita demonstrates that, as a sacred practice, sanctuary cannot be fixed in any one destination or mandate. She turns to those working to create sanctuary on the move, from a deported nurse offering medical care on the border to incarcerated migrant women denying rules on touch in detention facilities to collectives set up to honor those who died crossing the border. Understanding sanctuary to be a set of fugitive practices that escapes the everyday, Sostaita shows us how, in the wake of extreme violence and loss, migrants create sanctuaries of their own to care for the living and the dead.