Visiting Scholars

Feminist In/Security: Vulnerability, Securitization, and States of Crisis

The IRW hosts feminist researchers from around the world as Visiting Scholars, enabling them to pursue their own research and writing in a supportive environment while accessing Rutgers’ unique feminist resources. Visiting Scholars participate in the IRW seminar, present public lectures and speak in classes throughout the university.

 Basuli Deb
"Indigenous Lives and Diasporic Aspirations"

My current monograph project Indigenous Lives and Diasporic Aspirations examines the heteropatriarchal politics of legislative and technological control of indigenous and immigrant communities in settler colonial security regimes. Situating literature, films, images, legal, prison, and administrative documents, media, and social media within a transnational and queer of color feminist frame, it extends the inquiry into states of exception vis-a-vis terrorism at home and abroad initiated by my previous monograph Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture (2014).....I use narratives and images of indigeneity and immigration in South Africa, India, and the United States to revise the dominant frame of transnational feminist and queer praxis around international and national security that advocates for border crossing without recognizing that “the land of immigrants” is a settler colonial myth that erases indigenous claims to land. I propose an alternative paradigm for transnational feminist and queer justice that includes the original inhabitants of the land in a discourse and praxis of affiliation and community where the indigenous and the diasporic intersect.

Basuli Deb joins IRW from Queens College, CUNY

Maria Cecilia Hwang
"Mixing Work and Pleasure in Hong Kong: Women’s Migration, Sex Work, Border Control, and the Politics of Trafficking"

My research examines the migration and labor of women sex workers from the Philippines and interrogates how the global campaign against human trafficking has affected their lives and livelihood. Based on thirteen months of ethnography conducted in Hong Kong between 2010 and 2013, my project challenges their identification as “trafficked persons.” I argue that rather than making migration safe for women, anti-trafficking policies that are premised on a paradigm of rescue have only compounded their vulnerability. Broadly, my project bridges scholarly conversation in gender and migration and human trafficking and focuses on understudied patterns of labor migration that are presumed to involve trafficking in persons. Specifically, I examine the dynamics of informal labor migration channels, South-South migration, and short-term migration flows.

Maria Cecilia Hwang joins IRW from Brown University