Miranda Hallett

Miranda Cady Hallett (PhD Cornell University) is Director of Human Rights Studies, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, and Research Fellow at the University of Dayton, Ohio. She serves as expert witness in U.S. immigration hearings, and lectures and writes on migration and rights regimes in the Americas for scholarly and public venues.

Articles include an ethnography of racialized moral politics for Latino Studies, a 2014 piece in Law and Social Inquiry about the tensions and contradictions of Temporary Protected Status, a 2019 article in PoLAR on the Ministry for Salvadorans Abroad, and a 2022 case study in Citizenship Studies about organizing to denounce abuses in an Ohio detention center, co-authored with Yulianna Otero-Asmar. A recent blog for Border Criminologies (co-authored by Rebecca Judeh) draws on new work examining continuities of gendered violence for Central American women asylum seekers, with emphasis on kinship, family separation, and reproductive injustice.

Hallett also works to convene scholars and advocates across disciplinary lines through workshops, special editions of academic journals, and other collaborative projects—most recently having co-edited, with Jamie Longazel, the volume Migration and Mortality: social death, dispossession, and survival in the Americas (Temple University Press 2021). Her project while at the Centre for Sociolegal Studies is a book manuscript entitled More Than Survival, which explores the ethical flaws in citizenship-as-status and the potential for a revitalized democracy in the Americas through “abolitionist sanctuary,” drawing on insights and ideas emerging from her fieldwork with the Salvadoran diaspora over the past twenty-five years.