The Color of Asylum: An Evening with Katherine Jensen and Sara McKinnon

This event: Is LGBTQ hosted, May be of interest to the LGBTQ community || A Room of One’s Own is thrilled to welcome Katherine Jensen and Sara McKinnon for a reading and conversation on Katherine’s new book The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil.

The Color of Asylum is an ethnography of the difficult experiences of refugees in Brazil. Brazil is widely lauded as a best place in the world for refugees. Yet its celebrated policies belie how racism undergirds how the asylum process unfolds. Taking readers on a journey through asylum, The Color of Asylum follows asylum seekers as they navigate the refugee regime—from how they arrive in Brazil, through the steps of applying for asylum and seeking assistance, to their lives after refugee status. Centering Syrian and Congolese refugees, Jensen shows how their asylum experiences dramatically differ as they encounter a deeply unequal racial political order. This book exposes the limits of refugee status and the racial ramifications of refugee inclusion.

Katherine Jensen is 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.

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. ||