Published: June 29, 2021

Call for Proposals
Submissions due: Oct. 1, 2021
Editors: Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz

Violence, Migration, and Detention during Trump’s Reign of Terror and Beyond

Although rooted in a long history and lineage of state violence and immigration enforcement, the Trump administration (2016-2020) enacted countless examples of white supremacy, anti-migrant violence, vigilante shootings and assaults, family separation, child abductions, caging of children, border policing, the increased incarceration of Latinx migrants, the sexual and reproductive abuse of migrants, and rhetoric and policies that framed them as criminals, gangsters, and rapists. 

This book seeks interdisciplinary scholarship and artistic responses that consider the impacts of Trump’s immigration and detention policies and the whole scale criminalization of BIPoC migrants indigenous to Abya Yala (The Americas and the Caribbean). We seek work by established leaders and by rising stars from various areas and disciplines including Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x Studies, Ethnic Studies, Queer, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Latin American Studies, American Studies, Immigration Studies, History, Critical Refugee Studies, Critical Indigeneity’s, Cultural Studies, and Theater, Performance, Fashion, Visual and Communication Studies. We are also interested in work by and about artists who create counter-narratives in visual, performative, and sonic, or multi-modal registers that push back on the demonization of migrants and create other registers of trauma, pain, sadness, hope, solidarity, and abolition.

The volume will also consider work that addresses nativism, vigilante violence, and the cruelty of border and detention policies before Trump’s reign of terror as well as futurist visions. We are especially interested in considering work that speaks to and challenges white supremacy, toxic masculinities, transphobia, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, empire, global militarism, neoliberalism, transnational histories, indigenous migrations, and queer of color critique.

Some topics to be addressed may include:

  • Family separation, unaccompanied minors, and the zero-tolerance policy
  • Migrant children, trauma, and state violence
  • Migrant detention centers and refugee camps
  • Immigration enforcement and toxic rape culture
  • Colonialities of power and border patrol violence
  • ICE and predatory masculinities, cruelty, internalized racism
  • Medical and sterilization abuse in migrant detention
  • The operations of the detention and deportation regime and technologies of power
  • Migrant incarceration and the carceral state
  • Abolish ICE, prison abolition, migrant resistance, and transborder solidarities 
  • Migrant deportability and illegality
  • Migrant death and necropolitics
  • Biometrics, surveillance, and border security
  • Border militarization and migrant crossings
  • ICE raids
  • Migrant smuggling
  • The business of migration and Homeland Security
  • Deportation, drugs, and gangs
  • Trump’s border wall

Please submit either a  3-page proposal, a 15–25-page paper draft,  and/or original creative work,  and CV to arturo.aldama@colorado.edu and jessica.ordaz@colorado.edu.

Respectfully,

Arturo J. Aldama 
Chair and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado Boulder 

Jessica Ordaz
Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado Boulder