My Ph.D. research is concerned with how the United States’ border materializes along the coast of South Florida.  I focus on the interaction of three unstable elements: a fluid physical landscape, migrants’ shifting strategies to make it to shore, and U.S. immigration policy. I am interested in the material sites where the socio-political discourse of the boundary between one place and another becomes tangible, identifiable, and locatable. Abstract notions of “the border” attempt to stabilize unruly social relationships through the perceived fixity of the material world.  By studying the repeated encounters between border enforcement officials and migrants attempting to reach shore, we can see how practices help shape and challenge what and where the border is taken to be.