College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Between 2016 and 2019, thousands of migrant children were detained at the Homestead Temporary Shelter, a detention camp in South Miami-Dade County, Florida. Though ostensibly a place of humanitarian refuge for “unaccompanied” and asylum-seeking children, detained children were exposed to harmful sounds and toxic material from an adjacent military base. This talk tells the story of the detention camp in relation to the military base, which is a crucial node in the hemispheric circulation of weapons, soldiers, and military expertise. By thinking across space and scale, an ethnographic approach challenges ideas of detention camps as spaces of exception and instead understand them as porous, permeable, and embedded within suburban landscape.

Emma Shaw Crane is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University in the City of New York, where she is affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. She received her PhD in American Studies from New York University in 2021. She is co-editor, with Ananya Roy, of Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South (University of Georgia Press 2015) and her work has been published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Public Culture, and Antipode. She researches and writes with a coalition of community organizations fighting for migrant and environmental justice in South Florida.

Scales of Belonging: Speaker Series 2023-24
Recent years have given life an experimental feel. As interlocked and unpredictable sources of upheaval become the norm, we ask: how and where do we belong? Exiles and refugees may never belong where they make homes. Migrants may never feel at home where they belong. While some choices we make, others are made for us. People move—as much as they are moved by nature and politics. In another key, we are moved by things that affect us: literature, sports, the lives of others. If shared worlds make life meaningful, then what forces repair and rupture the possibility of community? From football fields and detention centers to the planet itself, the Center’s 2023-24 Speaker Series investigates our myriad Scales of Belonging.