Sharing my book research with Colgate University students

This past Tuesday October 29, 2024, I greatly enjoyed paying a virtual visit to a class at Colgate University to share about my recently published book, Refiguring Race and Risk: Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State. I was invited by Dr. Anna Ríos-Rojas, an Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Colgate University and one of my former colleagues at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where we overlapped during the 2019-20 academic year. It was an absolute delight to reconnect with Dr. Ríos-Rojas and engage in robust conversation with her and her students.

Dr. Ríos-Rojas' course, titled "Globalization's Children: The Education of 'New' Immigrants in the U.S.," considers the ideological, legal, historical, and social systems of power that structure the lived experiences of migrants in the United States. To align with the course's investigation of US policies, attitudes, and narratives about im/migration, I discussed findings from my third book chapter, which examines how Helena María Viramontes' seminal work of environmental justice literature, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), narrates the experiences of Latinx migrant farmworkers in order to indict the toxic abuses of the US security state-backed agricultural industry. In this chapter, I argue that Viramontes' novel challenges an ideology that I call nativist environmentalism, which falsely equates protecting the United States' natural environment with defending the US-Mexico border against unwanted immigrants and which is fueled by the US security state's racist and xenophobic criminalization of migrants.

I was deeply impressed by the thoughtful questions that Dr. Ríos-Rojas' students asked following my talk, which included the following:

• Are there any unintended consequences that might result from using a care-based approach to risk management? Couldn’t the state problematically appropriate or exploit the care-based practices of communities of color?
• Why does our nation believe that immigrants are toxic and bad? What is the basis of this myth? How does it endure?
• How and why is risk imagined as embodied? How might protest manifest through the body? Why does the body often become a site of resistance against the state, or a site through which the state enacts its policies?
• Is literature the "best" form of protest? What makes it so effective as a form of protest?

Not surprisingly, these questions prompted a rich and provocative discussion, which filled me with new thoughts, questions, and much excitement. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Ríos-Rojas and her students for welcoming me into their vibrant  community.

Zoom screenshot with Dr. Ríos-Rojas' class.