The Queer Migration Network (QMN) is hosting a graduate student conference titled “No Bans, No Walls, No Detention Cells: A UA Graduate Student Conference on Migration.” This conference brings together graduate students from across UA departments and disciplines. Panels and a keynote speaker will center scholarship that explores how sexuality, gender, race, class, religion, geopolitics and other hierarchies comprise sites for struggle and possible transformation of current immigration systems.This conference aims to challenge the everyday violence of border militarization, travel bans, expanding detention, and larger power structures affecting the most marginalized amongst our communities.

As scholars we acknowledge that in order to confront the violences implemented on immigrant communities we must engage in creative interventions in both theory and action. These interventions are rooted in a collective re-imaging that envisions a future that does not rely on the criminalization, surveillance, and punishment of immigrant communities.

 

Organizing committee members:

Mel Ferrara, Gender & Women's Studies PhD Student

Cynthia Nayeli Carvajal, Educational Leadership & Policy PhD Candidate

Gloria Negrete-Lopez, Gender & Women's Studies PhD Student

Alejandra Ramírez, Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English PhD Candidate

Ruben Zecena, Gender & Women's Studies PhD Student