Abby Wheatley

Abby C. Wheatley is a cultural anthropologist with research and teaching interests in international migration and mobility, human rights, and transnational community regeneration. Spanning two regions, the US-Mexico and EU-Africa borders, her research considers the mechanisms through which migration becomes a dangerous and deadly endeavor, the strategies developed by people in transit to survive precarious crossings, and local efforts to circumvent failed immigration and refugee policies. Since 2013 she has been working closely with people in transit, community groups, and migrant justice activists on the Arizona-Sonora border, and in Lampedusa, Italy, since 2016. Before coming to Barrett, Abby taught courses on international migration, Latino experiences in the U.S., and Cultural Anthropology. In recent years, she has led more than fifteen field courses on Mexican and Central American migration through BorderLinks, an immersion program situated on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border that lays the foundation for understanding the intertwined processes of militarization, securitization, and criminalization.

Abby received her B.A., magna cum laude, from Occidental College in 2004 and her Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2015, where she also earned an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation. Her book manuscript: Con Sangre y Fuego: Mobility, Autonomy, and the Politics of Survival, examines a range of community-based strategies employed by Mexican and Central American migrants to survive and resist the highly militarized U.S.-Mexico border and weaponized desert created by U.S. border enforcement. As a public scholar-activist, she contributes to “Border Wars” at the North American Congress on Latin America, an independent news source providing information and analysis on Latin America, and its complex relationship with the United States.