This dissertation examines the logics operating behind practices of child removal and child placement in the context of the foster care system at the United States-México border. In the early 2000s, as deportation rates have continued to rise, the separation of families has been positioned as a problem central to debates around amnesty, contestations over birthright citizenship, and a more humanized approach to immigration policy in the context of the contemporary United States. For example, in April 2009, a New York Times article described legal battles over children who had entered the United States foster care systems due to the deportation of their parents, many of whom had been caught up in immigration raids and charged with such crimes as using false identification documents. Regardless of public outcry, the courts upheld the adoption of these children by U.S. families, discounting the desires of their biological parents because their deportation had given them criminal status, making them unfit parents in the eyes of U.S. law. This dissertation explores decisions about the removal and placement of children in the context of the "child protection," asking how structures of race, citizenship, and nationality inform determinations about proper parents, ideal homes, and state responsibility for minor citizens.

In the context of ongoing anti-immigrant sentiment, state interventions into families constitute a mode of delineating normative family formations. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research, this dissertation examines the interactions between immigration enforcement and the child welfare system at the U.S.-México border. Through engagement with social workers, legal actors, and families on both sides of the border I explore how individuals navigated this complex terrain. I ask how and when child welfare and immigration law come together in the lives of families, and I analyze the creative modes through which parents, social workers, lawmakers, and advocates navigate legal boundaries in an effort to maintain families across geographic and judicial borders. Ultimately, I argue that child welfare is a site that illuminates distinctions of race, class, and citizenship and where the vulnerability of particular populations of parents are produced. I suggest that understanding the everyday practices and processes through which determinations about child removal and child placement are made sheds light on the ways in which these complex institutions come together in the context of the border region.

Counterterrorism, the suppression of the capacity for insurgency, transforms the environments in which people live and die in Iraq. These environments consist of social arrangements that link humans with one another and with nonhuman beings, material objects, and chemical substances. How do families from Iraq’s Anbar province face intersecting forms of dislocation from their homes and land in the wake of the Global War on Terror? Through careful attention to daily modes of living, moving, and dying in and out of Anbar, this dissertation shows how Counterterrorism changes the way people read and interact with their environments, and how it makes them feel.

This research is based on one year of ethnographic research in 2014-2015 among farming families from and in Anbar, along with visits to Counterterrorism training camps in Jordan, Denmark and Bosnia. It documents how Iraq's landscape becomes charged with new meaning as Counterterrorism operatives and farmers make and respond to material things around them, and as configurations of time and space afford or foreclose the possibility for certain modes of existence to go on or begin. This ethnography centers on the materiality of Counterterrorism: temporal qualities of objects, molecular impacts of chemical traces, textures of landscapes, and dilation of attachments among material things. Practicing “transhumant ethnography,” the author participated in coming and going between Anbari farmland and refugee neighborhoods, and in moving between Counterterrorism training camps and Iraqi communities. Ethical commitments to Anbari farmers meant that this fieldwork involved both participant observation and activism, spending time with people in different positions of power, and centering the author’s own body as focal point of harm.

This dissertation defines what Counterterrorism is by examining what it does, something that has been missing from scholarship that “studies up” the logics and imaginaries of counterinsurgency elites. The research offer a new study of militarism by exploring aspects of Counterterrorism that exceed violence centered around the boundaries of death and killing. Instead, the author focuses on how less-than-lethal modalities of control are transformative to a vast array of inter-subjective relations among people and landscapes.

This dissertation employs 18 months of ethnographic research (i.e., experienced-based social, cultural, and legal inquiry) to explore Brazil’s new Internet Bill of Rights, the Marco Civil da Internet (MCI), and its impact on the poor and working class populations of Rio de Janeiro. Through its call for openness, promotion of Internet access as a civil right, and protection of net neutrality, the MCI seeks to advance democratic Internet governance in Brazil, a country known for its great social and economic inequality. Brazil has a population of approximately 210 million people and, as of 2016, roughly 95 million Brazilians lacked access to the Internet. This fact is relevant because Article 4 of the MCI promotes “the right of Internet access to all.” By enacting the MCI, the Brazilian government has seemingly envisioned universal Internet access as a core feature of their attempt to overcome decades of societal inequalities and help achieve a more authentic democracy. As legislation, the MCI is a laudable model of democratic Internet governance. I argue, however, that the disjunctive nature of Brazil’s democratic project reveals corresponding disjunctions in implementing the MCI’s objectives. By examining the significance of Internet governance that attempts to advance civil rights through the promotion of Internet access, my work uses the Internet and digital technology as a lens to explore the meaning of democracy in the Brazilian context.