As a feminist political geographer, I am broadly interested in studying the geographies of power, in particular how gender and kinship, immigration and citizenship, security and enforcement, and law and executive power work to spatialize relations of exclusion.  To explore these themes, my dissertation analyzes the policies and practices of immigrant family detention in the United States. This research asks:

(1) how spatialized conceptions of ‘the family’ and ‘the child’ are linked to their rights to home-like or detention spaces;
(2) how the intersection of different kinds of law (immigration law, judicial precedent, and executive discretion) create incoherent rights regimes for immigrant families; and
(3) how state and non-state actors participate in the construction and maintenance of borders, immigration law, and enforcement practices.

Using a multi-method research design, my analysis is based on archival research and semi-structured interviews at the two existing family detention facilities, and interviews with formerly detained parents. Throughout this research, I have worked with grassroots organizers and policy advocates towards an end to family detention, and I look forward to continuing such publically engaged research in a supportive scholarly environment.

The problem of family detention demands multiple analytic lenses, and I therefore combine close readings of Foucauldian governmentality approaches, feminist theories of embodiment, and political economic approaches to neoliberalism, devolution, and non-state actors. While my research began tracing the genealogy of the knowledge practices which enabled the detention of families, my archival research showed that federal funding for homeland security projects motivated both county governments and private corrections firms to propose detention programs. Thus, I now seek to understand how flows of financial resources stabilize practices of exclusion and reproduce discourses of criminality, illegality, and racism. To weave these approaches together, I draw on feminist geographic research, which has linked the discursive framing of women, im/migrants, and other groups to the materiality of their exclusion from political and social life. Based on this conceptual approach, I ask how different actors’ and institutions’ jockey for control over representation, financial resources, and physical exclusion.

Lauren’s current CV.
Lauren’s blog.