This event was part of the Wayne Morse Center’s 2017-19 theme, Borders, Migration, and Belonging.

12-2 p.m.: Brown bag lunch and public discussion
moderated by Jose Antonio Vargas (2017-18 Wayne Morse Chair) and Michael Hsu (member, Oregon Board of Parole and the first undocumented individual admitted to the Oregon bar)

2-4 p.m.: Scholarly symposium

Featured speakers

Kelly Lytle Hernandez is an associate professor in the UCLA History Department. Her work focuses on race, policing, immigration, and incarceration in the United States. Her new book, City of Inmates: Conquest and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), explores the long rise of incarceration as a social institution.

Torrie Hester is an assistant professor in the St. Louis University History Department. Her research interests include immigration and region, race and ethnicity, as well as law and foreign policy during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Her book Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy (Penn Press, 2017) shows how early U.S. deportation law and policy shaped the country. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Oregon in 2008.

Sharon Luk is an assistant professor in the University of Oregon Ethnic Studies Department. Her fields of study include racism and racial capitalism, ethnic ontologies, epistemology, social movements, feminisms, and ephemeral archives. Her book The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity (forthcoming fall 2017, University of California Press) explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of mass incarceration and its attendant racial regimes in California history.