July 2023 Faculty Spotlight

In our faculty spotlight this month professor Felicia Arriaga discusses social justice, passes along an enlightening graphic on the prison industrial complex, and offers some insight on her new book, Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America.

You teach in Marxe’s Social Justice MPA specialization. What do students do in your social justice courses?
In general, we’re structuring the specialization to help students develop the academic and applied skills to analyze structures and systems driving inequality, injustices, and exclusion, and to develop policies and strategies to create and sustain a just and equitable society.

What are the most pressing social justice issues of today? How do we address them?
One large issue that I both research and discuss in a variety of ways in class is the prison industrial complex.

We can address the outer areas in purple by making sure we’re developing policies that are centering those most impacted. There’s a great resource people can check out called 1 Million Experiments where people are testing experiments to combat all of the areas in the image. One million experiments is exploring snapshots of community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.

Tell us about your newest book, Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America
Behind Crimmigration came out of my dissertation research and I was motivated to write the book by some of the community members I met while conducting field research. In the book, I argue that the long-term partnership between local sheriffs and immigration law enforcement in places like North Carolina has created a form of racialized social control of the Latinx community. I use data from five county sheriff’s offices and their governing bodies to trace the creation and subsequent normalization of ICE and local law enforcement partnerships. I include evidence that also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems. While the book focuses on NC, some of the same processes exist all around us and I encourage people to look up policies in their communities using some tools like TRAC Immigration tools: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/tools/ and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center enforcement map: https://www.ilrc.org/resources/national-map-local-entanglement-ice

What classes will you be teaching in the fall?
Immigrant Cities and Race, Inequality, and Public Policy