Fall 2017 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, anthropology
Erin Routon is a Ph.D. candidate in the anthropology department at Cornell. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Hawaii, Hilo in 2006 and her M.A. in religious studies at the University of California–Riverside in 2013. Her master's research concentrated on migrant material culture and religious aid and activist organizations in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, principally in Southern California and Arizona. Her dissertation research focuses on humanitarian legal aid in immigrant "family" detention facilities, primarily in south Texas. Through this ethnographic project, she is interested in addressing questions concerning gender, emotional labor, on-the-ground counter-conducts, and the management of the complex relationship between the state, for-profit carceral entities, and humanitarian legal aid within the current climate of immigrant detention.