Associate Professor
Email: astuesse(@)unc.edu
Phone: (919) 843-7393
Website: AngelaStuesse.com
Fax: 919-962-1613
Office: Alumni Hall 413C
Areas of Interest:
Neoliberal globalization; race, ethnicity, and identity; migration; human rights; labor; methodologies of activist research; the U.S. South and Southwest; Latino and Latin America; Equatorial Guinea
Education:
Ph.D., Anthropology, University Texas, Austin
M.A., Latin American Studies, University of Texas, Austin
B.A., Anthropology and Latin American Studies, University of Florida
Fieldwork Experience:
Southern United States, U.S.-Mexico border, Guatemala, Mexico, Equatorial Guinea
Research:
Globalization of the U.S. South
For nearly two decades I have been studying the globalization of the rural U.S. South. Begun alongside a worker center in Mississippi’s poultry region, this research considers how the recent influx of Latin American migrants is impacting regional identities, racial hierarchies, industrial relations, and labor organizing. In addition to producing my first book, Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South, this work has resulted in several articles and book chapters, as well as a popular education curriculum, Solidarity/Solidaridad: Building Cross-Cultural Understanding for Poultry Worker Justice. Learn more here.
Immigrant Policing
Since 9/11 U.S. immigration enforcement has undergone an important transformation, transitioning from a primary focus on border enforcement to an increasingly dispersed practice of immigrant policing at the level of communities’ daily routines of social reproduction deep within the nation’s interior. My collaborative research in Atlanta with Mat Coleman explores the genesis and mechanics of this shift, analyzes its effects on new immigrant populations, and examines the political mobilization of immigrant rights groups in response. In Chapel Hill I am a participant in Apoyo’s ICE verifier network. Learn more here.
Dreamers in Higher Education
Every year 65,000 students graduate from U.S. high school unable to participate fully in society due to their undocumented legal status. In most states these “Dreamers” cannot attend college at in-state rates. With an eye to better understanding and addressing this social problem, I have conducted research with Heide Castañeda on undocumented students’ access in Florida’s institutions of higher education following the passage of Florida’s 2014 “tuition equity” bill, resulting in the UndocuAlly USF initiative. In Georgia I have followed and supported the work of Freedom University, which provides college-level classes, scholarship assistance, and leadership development for undocumented students in Georgia, where they are prohibited from attending the state’s top five public universities. At UNC I serve on the Provost’s DACA/Undocumented Resource Team and helped establish UndocuCarolina, an initiative that works to increase visibility, support, and resources for undocumented members of the Carolina community. Learn more here.
#FreeDany: Dreaming and Detention in Dixie
My current project brings these three strands of research together in a book co-authored with Dreamer and long-time research collaborator, Daniela Vargas. Part ethnography, part memoir, part cultural analysis of the shifting terrain of immigration law and enforcement since 9/11, #FreeDany charts, through the experiences of one young person and her family, how the lives of undocumented youth in the twenty-first century U.S. South have been indelibly shaped by the country’s discourses and policies on immigration.
Teaching:
At UNC I teach in the Department of Anthropology and the Curriculum in Global Studies. I also serve on the Advisory Boards of the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research and the Latina/o Studies Program. I am committed to involving students in participatory, politically engaged research and believe deeply in the transformative potential of experiential learning. My trajectory as an educator began in popular and adult education settings, and I strive to bring these sensibilities into the university classroom, using interactive techniques that value and build upon students’ life experience, fostering horizontal relationships of shared responsibility, and creating opportunities for students to problem-solve real-world issues.
Courses Taught
FYS: New Ethnographies of Latinx Migration (ANTH 089)
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 102)
Work and Migration in the Americas (ANTH 490)
Ethnographic Research Methods (ANTH 490)
Engaging Ethnography (ANTH 898)
Decolonizing Methodologies (ANTH 898)
Global Migration (GLBL 703)
Selected Publications:
Books
Stuesse, Angela. 2016. Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Awards: Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology Book Prize (2017); Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award (2017); Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize (2016)
Reviews: PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (July 2018); Journal of Southern History 84(1)230-232 (2018); American Quarterly 69(2):421-433 (2017); Anthropology of Work Review 38(2):113-116 and 117-118 (2017)
Articles
Stuesse, Angela. 2018. “When They’re Done with You: Legal Violence and Structural Vulnerability among Injured Immigrant Poultry Workers.” Anthropology of Work Review 39(2):79-93.
Saxton, Dvera and Angela Stuesse. 2018. “Workers’ Decompensation: Engaged Research with Injured Im/migrant Workers.” Anthropology of Work Review 39(2):65-78.
Stuesse, Angela, Cheryl Staats, and Andrew Grant-Thomas. 2017. “As Others Pluck Fruit Off the Tree of Opportunity: Immigration, Racial Hierarchies, and Intergroup Relations Efforts in the United States.” Du Bois Review 14(1):245-271.
Gray, Maggie, Sarah Horton, Vanesa Ribas, and Angela Stuesse. 2017. “Immigrant Labor, Food Politics: A Dialogue between the Authors of Four Recent Books about the Food System.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 17(1):1-14.
Coleman, Mathew and Angela Stuesse. 2016. “The ‘Disappearing State’ and the Quasi-Event of Immigration Control.” Antipode 48(3):524-543.
Yelvington, Kevin A., Alisha R. Winn, E. Christian Wells, Angela Stuesse, Nancy Romero-Daza, Lauren C. Johnson, Antoinette T. Jackson, Emelda Curry, Heide Castañeda. 2015. “Diversity Dilemmas and Opportunities: Training the Next Generation of Anthropologists.” American Anthropologist. 117(2):387-392.
Stuesse, Angela and Mathew Coleman. 2014. “Automobility, Immobility, Altermobility: Surviving and Resisting the Intensification of Immigrant Policing.” City & Society 26(1):51-72.
Stuesse, Angela and Laura E. Helton. 2013. “Low-wage Legacies, Race, and the Golden Chicken in Mississippi: Where Contemporary Immigration Meets African American Labor History.” Southern Spaces.
Stuesse, Angela, with Beatriz Manz, Elizabeth Oglesby, Kriston Olson, Victoria Sanford, Clyde Snow, & Heather Walsh-Haney. 2013. “Sí hubo genocidio: Anthropologists and the Genocide Trial of Guatemala’s Rios Montt.” American Anthropologist. 115(4):658-663.
Griffith, David, Shao-hua Liu, Michael Paolisso, and Angela Stuesse. 2013. “Enduring Whims and Public Anthropology.” American Anthropologist. 115(1):125-126.
Stuesse, Angela. 2010. “Challenging the Border Patrol, Human Rights, and Persistent Inequalities: An Ethnography of Struggle in South Texas.” Latino Studies 8(1):23-47.
Stuesse, Angela. 2010. “What’s ‘Justice and Dignity’ Got to Do with It? Migrant Vulnerability, Corporate Complicity, and the State.” Human Organization 69(1):19-30.
Book Chapters
Guevara, Juan Carlos, Angela Stuesse, and Mathew Coleman. 2017. “I Used to Believe in Justice.” In Forced Out and Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Field. T. Golash-Boza, ed. Pp. 185-192. New York: Oxford University Press.
2015 Stuesse, Angela. “Anthropology for Whom? Challenges and Prospects of Activist Scholarship.” In Public Anthropology in a Borderless World. S. Beck and C. Maida, eds. Pp. 221-246. New York: Berghahn Books.
2014 Coleman, Mathew and Angela Stuesse. “Policing Borders, Policing Bodies: The Territorial and Biopolitical Roots of U.S. Immigration Control.” In Placing the Border in Everyday Life. R. Jones and C. Johnson, eds. Pp. 33-63. Farnham: Ashgate. Winner of 2016 Association for Borderlands Studies’ Past Presidents’ Gold Book Award.
2009 Stuesse, Angela. “Race, Migration, and Labor Control: Neoliberal Challenges to Organizing Mississippi’s Poultry Workers.” In Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South. M. Odem and E. Lacy, eds. Pp. 91-111. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Public Scholarship
Stuesse, Angela. 2017. “The Political Power of Laughter According to Imprisoned Activist Ramón Esono Ebalé.” HuffPost South Africa. December 4 (November 22). huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/12/04/the-political-power-of-laughter-according-to-imprisoned-activist-ramon-esono-ebale_a_23296102/
Stuesse, Angela. 2017. “The Town Where the Asphalt Ends.” University of California Press Blog. November 28. ucpress.edu/blog/33611/the-town-where-the-asphalt-ends/
Stuesse, Angela. 2017. “Bearing Witness to Immigration Raids in the Trump Era.” Huffington Post. February 16. huffingtonpost.com/entry/bearing-witness-to-immigration-raids-in-the-trump-era_us_58a5d67be4b0b0e1e0e2079a
Stuesse, Angela. 2016. “Home to Roost: Activist Research in the Deep South.” University of California Press Blog. November 15. ucpress.edu/blog/23502/home-to-roost-activist-research-in-the-deep-south/
Horton, Sarah and Angela Stuesse. 2016. “Criminalizing Immigrants Hurts All Workers as IRCA Turns 30.” Daily Kos. November 3. dailykos.com/story/2016/11/3/1590562/-Criminalizing-Immigrants-Hurts-All-Workers-as-IRCA-Turns-30
Stuesse, Angela, Mat Coleman, and Sarah Horton. 2016. “Driving While Latino.” Huffington Post. September 29. huffingtonpost.com/entry/driving-while-latino_us_57ed6ce4e4b07f20daa1052f
2016 Stuesse, Angela. “Why We Wear Diapers at Work.” Huffington Post. May 20.
2016 Stuesse, Angela and Shannon Speed. “Georgia’s Ban on Undocumented College Students Puts State on Wrong Side of History.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution. February 4.
2015 Stuesse, Angela. “The Truth about Your Holiday Turkey.” Colorlines. December 23.
2013 EG Justice, with Angela Stuesse. “DOJ vs. Teodorin 101.” October 29.
Engaged Projects:
UndocuCarolina
An initiative at UNC that works to increase visibility, support, and resources for undocumented members of the Carolina community. Learn more here.
Engaged Ethnography
An online list of politically engaged ethnographies to foster broader reading and teaching of engaged ethnography and nurture the growth of a loose network of politically engaged ethnographers. Learn more here.
Intergroup Resources
A resource center for strengthening intergroup relations at the grassroots. Created with funding from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Supported and staffed by Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity (SPACEs). Learn more here.
