2021-2022 A&S Distinguished Professor Lecture

Patricia Ehrkamp

Professor and Chair, Department of Geography

Geographic studies of migration have resoundingly demonstrated that the pathways for people on the move are not simple linear trajectories, but routinely involve circuitous routes that may be repeated and often involve a great deal of waiting, on paperwork, at border crossings, in detention, and sometimes in refugee camps. While refugee resettlement offers a hope for durable refuge for some, the naturalization process itself can become another moment of great uncertainty. This lecture is based on collaborative research in four resettlement sites in the US conducted 2016-2019 and funded by the US National Science Foundation (co-PIs Dr. Jenna Loyd at UW-Madison and Dr. Anna Secor at Durham University).

My talk explores the potentially contentious role of the medical waiver form (Medical Certification for Disability Exceptions (N-648)) in citizenship applications. Based on this collaborative work, I argue that medical certification requests deliberated during the naturalization process echo the medico-legal process of initial asylum-seeking, folding structures of scrutiny at time of entry into a similarly distrustful process years later. At both moments, legal terms of credibility can clash with medical knowledge about mental and physical functioning or impairments as certified by medical practitioners. Yet the denial of a citizenship application can prolong the time that one does not have access to benefits like Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which can negatively affect housing, food, transportation, and other daily needs. Thus, the denial of a medical waiver turns a process for making legal disability accommodations into a situation that sustains disabling living conditions while extending the horizon of citizenship. This analysis highlights how thinking critical refugee studies together with feminist disability studies provides avenues of further extending feminist understanding of geopolitical processes and space-times.

The event will be held in person and virtually. To register for the virtual event, click here. 

Dr. Brianna Theobald is an assistant professor of history and affiliate faculty in the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester. She is an award-winning teacher and researcher in the fields of U.S. women’s and gender history, the history of Native America, and the history of reproduction. Her first book, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century(University of North Carolina Press, 2019), explores the intersection of colonial and reproductive politics in Native America from the late nineteenth century to the present. She is currently working on two book-length projects, The Indigenous Clubwoman: Genealogies of Native Activism and Safe Haven: Feminisms and the Domestic Violence Movement.

The Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky (DRVK) project of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies will be hosting Mr. John Dalton from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) on Thursday March 3rd at 4:00 pm in the Young Library Auditorium (room 1-62).  Mr. John Dalton has a B.A. in Political Science, History, and Religion from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, is a 2009 Stanford Law School graduate, and is currently a Senior Attorney for EJI.  The EJI is a program, “committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”  DRVK’s aim is to collect biographies to memorialize victims of lynching in Kentucky from the end of the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century.  The talk, “Community Remembrance: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Injustice in America,” will build upon the work of the DRVK and EJI. 



The talk is sponsored by the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, African American & Africana Studies, the Gaines Center, the University of Kentucky History Department, the University of Kentucky Geography Department, and the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law.  

This lecture unfortunately needs to be postponed. We will arange another time when possible.