Focusing on gender, deportation, and labor, the third and final session of Non-citizenship, UC Santa Cruz’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture, approaches citizenship, denizenship, and mobility as fluid statuses—as formal (in other words, documented) positions that are in flux and as practices of belonging that morph as people of various statuses interact with each other.

Please join us for this free, public seminar with Tanya Golash-Boza, Professor of Sociology at UC Merced, and Rhacel Parreñas, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.  To reserve your lunch and to access the pre-circulated readings, please register here:

Following the seminar, Professors Golash-Boza and Parreñas will take part in The Fluidity of Status: Non-citizenship, Deportation, and Indentured Mobility, a public conversation at the Museum of Art & History at 705 Front Street in downtown Santa Cruz.

Tanya Golash-Boza is the author of five books, including Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism (New York University Press, 2015), which explains mass deportation in the context of the global economic crisis; Due Process Denied (Routledge, 2012), which describes how and why non-citizens in the United States have been detained and deported for minor crimes, without regard for constitutional limits on disproportionate punishment; and Immigration Nation (Paradigm, 2012), which provides a critical analysis of the impact that US immigration policy has on human rights.  In addition, she has published over a dozen articles in peer-reviewed journals on deportations, racial identity, and human rights and has written on contemporary issues for Al Jazeera, The Boston Review, The Nation, Counterpunch, The Houston Chronicle, Racialicious, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Dissident Voice.

Rhacel Parreñas‘ book, Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo (Stanford University Press, 2011), won the Distinguished Book Award in the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association. Probing the intersections of human trafficking and labor migration, her current research analyzes the constitution of unfree labor among migrant domestic workers in Dubai and Singapore. Her other books include Human Trafficking Reconsidered: Migration and Forced Labor (Open Society Institute, 2014), The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization (New York University Press, 2008), and Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work (second edition, Stanford University Press, 2015). Her current research focuses on the unfree labor of migrant contract workers in Asia and the Middle East.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Chicano Latino Research Center and Institute for Humanities Research, with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.