Stop by A Room of One’s Own bookstore on Monday, September 11th at 6:00pm for the official book launch of The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil, with author Katherine Jensen and Sara McKinnon.
In The Color of Asylum, Katherine Jensen explores how the experiences of refugees in Brazil differ depending on one’s nation of origin. The book specifically looks at how the experiences of Syrian and Congolese refugees differ. By taking an ethnographic approach, the book allows readers to explore the asylum system in Brazil through the lives of individuals who have lived through and navigated or are currently navigating it. Through these narratives, readers are able to better understand how the asylum experience in Brazil can differ widely based on an individual’s home nation as well as the systemic and societal factors in Brazil that create this reality.
Katherine Jensen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She investigates race/racism, the state, and immigration in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. She is the Faculty Coordinator of the Wisconsin Collective for Ethnographic Research, and a former Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. She is the author of The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil, published with the University of Chicago Press.
Katherine will be accompanied by Sara McKinnon during the reading and talk. Sara McKinnon is Professor of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies, and co-chair of the Human Rights Program. Her research is the areas of migration, legal studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of the book Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which charts the incorporation of gender provisions in US refugee and asylum law within the context of broader national and global politics, and co-editor of the book Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press, 2016), which considers a range of approaches for using ethnographic and field-based research methods in rhetorical research.
A Room of One’s Own bookstore can be found at 2717 Atwood Avenue, Madison, WI 53704.
