'Border-to-Border' Colloquia Series continues through April 5

The spring 2013 Colloquia Series hosted by Arizona State University’s Comparative Border Studies initiative titled "Border-to-Border: Mexico-U.S.-Canada" is underway and continues through April 5 in Memorial Union on ASU’s Tempe campus.

The series is free and open to the public. Reservations are required and can be made at borders.asu.edu/colloquia. Speakers slated for the remainder of the series include the following:

Luis F.B. Plascencia and Elizabeth Hoover, noon-2 p.m., Feb. 8, Memorial Union La Paz room 242. Plascencia is an assistant professor of anthropology at ASU. He is a 2012-2013 Comparative Border Studies grant recipient. His research focuses on the Mexico-United States border, citizenship and nationalism, Latinos in the U.S. and contract labor programs. Plascencia is author of “Disenchanting Citizenship: Mexican Migrant and the Boundaries of Belonging,” published in June 2012 by Rutgers University Press. He also is co-editing an anthology on Mexican labor in Arizona covering the 1912-2012 period.

Elizabeth Hoover is an assistant professor of American studies and ethnic studies, with a focus in American Indian studies, at Brown University. Her work is focused on environmental health and food justice and the importance of “citizen science” in Native American communities. Hoover’s most current research is with the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, which shares two borders with three state/provinces (New York, Ontario and Quebec). She also is working with indigenous subsistence revival organizations that are trying to reconnect the community with farming and a healthier lifestyle.

Holly Karibo, noon-2 p.m., Feb. 15, Memorial Union La Paz room 242. Karibo earned her doctorate in the Collaborative Program in History and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the 2012-2013 Comparative Border Studies visiting fellow. Her dissertation, “Ambassadors of Pleasure: Illicit Economies in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland, 1945-1960,” examines the social and cultural history of vice along the Canada-U.S border during the post-World War II period. Currently Karibo is expanding her dissertation research by considering how the U.S.-Mexico border has shaped public perceptions of heroin trafficking in Canada and the U.S.

Susan Gray, noon-2 p.m., April 5, Memorial Union Rincon room 248. Gray is associate professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at ASU. She is a 2012-2013 Comparative Border Studies grant recipient. Currently, Gray is completing “Lines of Descent: Family Stories from the North Country,” a multigenerational biography of a mixed- race, Odawa and white family, based on their personal narratives, for the University of North Carolina Press. She pursues threads from these stories across the U.S./Canadian border in her new project – a biography of two Odawa cousins, Francis Assikinack and Andrew J. Blackbird.

For information about Comparative Border Studies, a strategic research initiative within ASU’s School of Transborder Studies, contact Elizabeth Cantú, executive coordinator, at 480-727-7583 or Elizabeth.Cantu@asu.edu.