Gilberto Rosas is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latinx Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His expertise includes questions of state formation, immigration, criminality, race and its intersections, borders, biopolitics, and ethnographic research techniques in the thickening Mexico-United States borderlands. His award-winning book, Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Duke, 2012), combines notions of state power and sovereignty with oral histories of barrio libre’s inhabitants, accounting for life along the border as seen and experienced by its most marginalized actors. His most recent publication “Necro-subjection: On Borders, Asylum and Making Dead to Let Live” (2019) investigates “necro-subjugation” and those that are denied the privilege of citizenship yet subordinated to the politics of death at the US-Mexico border.
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