Alana Ackerman (Anthropology) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. In her project “Rethinking War Across Borders: Violence, Refuge, and the ‘Colombian Armed Conflict’ in Quito, Ecuador” she is researching how the violence of war is reproduced across international borders, in spaces and at times of supposed peace and refuge.
Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My research is concerned with rethinking experiences and constructions of migration, displacement, refuge, and violence in the Global South. More specifically, my dissertation is an ethnography rooted in Colombian refugees’ experiences, knowledge, and narratives as they navigate intersecting forms of violence in Ecuador. Their experiences challenge the commonsense belief that refugees encounter refuge after crossing an international border. They also illuminate structures of state-based and extralegal power and violence that are often invisibilized, and demonstrate how refugees critique and contest these structures in a context of South-South displacement. My project is unique for bridging fields of study such as the anthropology of refuge and violence, critical refugee studies, and Latin American studies, which allows me to rethink relations of power in a non-U.S.-based context.
What drives your interest in this research?
The main motivation for this project comes from my time living in Ecuador, first as a “study abroad” student in 2007, and later as a temporary and then permanent resident of the country. During this time, I learned that my own experience as a white U.S. citizen in Ecuador—while sometimes frustrating as I navigated state bureaucracy and power—located me in a position of privilege compared to what Colombians often encounter there: xenophobia, racism, cross-border persecution, and exclusion from formal labor markets. I also learned, and continue to learn, about the kinds of interpersonal care and strategies that refugees enact in Ecuador to confront these intersecting violences. I feel compelled to think through and write about these forms of violence and resistance in a place where I am both an outsider, and at home.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
Participating in the HRI fellowship seminar has been an enriching and mind-opening experience. Beyond the extremely helpful feedback I received on my own work, it is such a learning experience to read my colleagues’ writing-in-progress and observe everyone’s responses and feedback each week. I have learned about issues, approaches, theories, questions, and fields of study that I would not have been exposed to otherwise. The fellowship seminar has also provided a sense of community and camaraderie, so critical during this protracted present of genocide, nationalism, and oligarchy. And the HRI fellowship has also allowed me to focus on editing my writing, which has begun to feel like a small revolutionary act of change that I can practice every day.