Red Emma’s Bookstore (3128 Greenmount Ave)

The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies & the Center for Gun Solutions are pleased to welcome Ieva Jusionyte (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University) for a conversation about her book

EXIT WOUNDS: HOW AMERICA’S GUNS FUEL VIOLENCE ACROSS THE BORDER

Dr. Jusionyte’s scholarship explores the conceptual and material relationship between the state and various forms of violence. She uses ethnography as a method and a form of storytelling to examine the narratives, aesthetics, and practices that underlie security. Based on fieldwork with Argentine news journalists and with Mexican and American emergency responders, her first two books examined the power asymmetries that underlie the legal and political construction of threats and the manifold social effects these discourses, policies, and practices have in communities where they are applied. Her latest book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (University of California Press 2024), follows firearms that circulate in the binational space between the United States and Mexico, both as policy objects and cultural artifacts. It is as much a cultural history of guns in two neighboring countries that share the legacies of colonialism and frontier violence, as an analysis of the politics and economics that perpetuate the vicious circle of violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. A legal and medical anthropologist who studies, teaches and writes about violence and security, she is the author of three books, including multiple award-winning ethnography, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Fulbright Program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, among others. 

In conversation with

Nicole Fabricant (Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Towson University): Dr. Fabricant’s research interests focus on the cultural politics of resource wars in Latin America. Her first book and early publications  centered on the Landless Peasant Movement (MST-Bolivia) a 50,000-member social movement comprised of displaced peasants, informal laborers, and intellectuals fighting for land redistribution and the revitalization of small-scale farming. She has written about the creative ways in which displaced peoples use and mobilize cultural forms to push for political and economic reforms. Critical reflections on the new politics of resources, territory and identity in Bolivia appear in Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Rights and Territory in a Plurinational State, a co-edited volume with Bret Gustafson from Washington University (SAR Press, 2011).