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Professor Ulla D. Berg

Title: Beyond cruelty: agency, personhood and relationality in detention & deportation research

Abstract: Public and scholarly attention to detention and deportation from the United States has for good reasons been dominated by narratives of brutality and state violence. While such accounts are vital, they often leave underexamined what deportation looks like once migrants subjected to deportation move beyond the gaze of spectating publics. Drawing on anthropological ethnographic fieldwork conducted intermittently between 2015 and 2022 with deported migrants and their families in Kichwa-speaking communities of Cañar in southern Ecuador and in urban neighborhoods of Lima and the port district of Callao, Peru, this talk examines deportation as a lived and relational social process.

Using a transnational analytic framework, I explore how deported migrants, their families, and communities navigate the aftermath of deportation and actively work to reconstitute lives, relationships, and personhood across borders. I show that migrants’ capacities to make life after deportation are shaped not only by family and community contexts of reception, but also by gender, life course stage, kinship and support networks, and prior migration trajectories. Rather than positioning deportation solely as a moment of rupture, this analysis reveals how deportation unfolds within families and communities whose social relations, gender roles, and moral expectations are already profoundly transnationalized by migration. Attending to deportees’ agency and relational embeddedness, the talk argues for an anthropological approach to detention and deportation that moves beyond the shock of cruelty to illuminate how power, personhood, and belonging are negotiated in everyday life after removal.

Bio: Professor Ulla D. Berg is an Associate Professor at the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Anthropology and former Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers (2015-2021). As a sociocultural and visual anthropologist specializing in Latin America and in Latino communities in the U.S., Prof. Berg's research focuses on historical and contemporary processes and experiences of migration and mobility within Latin America and between this region and the United States. Her first book, Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S., examined how transnational communicative practices and forms of exchange produce new forms of kinship and sociality across multiple borders among racialized global labor migrants. She has also edited several edited volumes including El Quinto Suyo: Transnacionalidad y Formaciones Diaspóricas en la Migración Peruana (with Karsten Paerregaard), Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas (with Robyn Rodriguez), Migración (with Irére Ceja and Soledad Alvarez Velasco), Latinas/os in New Jersey: Histories, Communities, and Cultures (with Aldo Lauria Santiago), and Elizabeth Detention Center: A Social History of Immigration Detention in New Jersey and the United States (with Carolina Sánchez Boe). Her book, Figures of Deportation, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.