Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, share a volatile history of fostering structural systems that sustain extreme violence against women, sanctioning the normalization of gender-based violence. Given the precarious environmental conditions of women fleeing the Northern Triangle regions, contextualization of their lived experiences as they navigate the duality of caretaker and survivor during the migration decision-making process is of the utmost importance in ensuring mental health wellness. Therefore, understanding trauma exposures during the migration journey, pre, during, and post flight periods, also known as the triple trauma paradigm, is necessitated. Through an in-depth literature review and synthesis of existing qualitative data, this thesis provides a conceptual framework to further understanding of how structural violence towards women increases their exposure to trauma throughout their lives, subsequently, increasing the probability of intergenerational trauma. Although the available literature documents migrant experiences, current research lacks an emphasis on migrant women’s experiences of structural gender-based violence, unresolved compounded trauma, and how those experiences influence their mental health outcomes. The appropriate contextualization of migrant women’s mental health encumbrances has both immediate and long-term implications on the establishment of appropriate intervention strategies explicitly tailored to the diverse mental health care needs of migrant women. As the number of women migrating to the U.S.-Mexico border region increases, it becomes increasingly critical to highlight the rising global mental health challenges they experience, which have societal and public health implications for migrant women’s life trajectories, and influence their ability to endure the challenges of transnational migration and resettlement in the U.S.

Adolescent pregnancy has come to symbolize all that is antithetical to the ideals of modern motherhood and remains a site upon which debates surrounding agency, intentionality, and responsibility take place. The moral schemas that structure such debates evolve against the standard of the self-managing, rational actor and are increasingly informed by ideologies that are primarily neoliberal rather than religious. Yet the cohesive self articulated in such tidy theories of human action remains elusive, a figment of the policymaker’s imagination. An analysis of the conflicting interpretative frameworks surrounding adolescent pregnancy in a small town on the U.S.-Mexico border complicates binary models of choice based on rational actor theory and illuminates the neoliberal grounds upon which the moral valence of intentionality rests.

In the midst of refugee crises, the proliferation of resources and healthcare services is the cardinal focus to address the acute need of those displaced. While much data is provided regarding the volume of refugees and asylees and the necessity for medical services, far fewer information exists discussing healthcare workers and their preparedness in dealing with the acute needs of those they are treating. Of those that have, many challenges are identified in all aspects of a healthcare provider’s experience of treating displaced individuals. While healthcare workers are vital to aiding in the critical needs of refugees and asylees, this can be more effectively accomplished when they are equipped to handle the unique health needs they encounter. The current study aims to explore healthcare providers preparedness in treating refugee and asylum seeker populations within San Diego County and how the level of preparedness effects the treatment delivered. In-depth interviews were conducted to support a literature analysis. Interviews and existing literature reveal that many limitations remain for healthcare workers to provide adequate care to the migrant populations. These barriers include institutional barriers which are heavily influenced by the political climate, as well as clinical barriers. Clinical barriers result from traditional medical training and the overspecialization of medicine in the US. This thesis also analyzes the influence of increasing political hostility and targeted threats on healthcare workers as a result.

Uganda’s AIDS epidemic was amplified by political breakdown and economic collapse during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, however, Uganda has attracted international attention for producing the most dramatic decline in HIV rates in East Africa. Largely due to the government’s openness in addressing AIDS, Uganda’s response to the epidemic has been characterized by diverse treatment and prevention efforts that reflect the country’s historical, political, economic, and sociocultural circumstances. The scaling-up of antiretroviral therapy, for example, relies on social cohesion within a community to improve and protect the well-being of its members, while Christian prevention initiatives that focus on abstinence and fidelity tend to emphasize individual responsibility and autonomy. Because these two responses to AIDS draw on conceptualizations of the self and person that differ markedly, they are able to impact a greater number of people in Uganda’s rapidly changing society.

This dissertation is an ethnography of the Emmanuel community, a transnational Catholic Charismatic intentional community and its two affiliated humanitarian NGOs in France and Rwanda. It investigates how love, empathy and other moral sentiments are implicated in processes of self and social transformation, and the manners in which Emmanuel’s relational ethos, or ethic of love, comes into expression in 1) quotidian life, 2) devotional and ritual practice, and 3) humanitarian outreach. In these settings I show how religious and cultural difference against the background of distinct histories of conflict, violence and complex postcolonial realities shape sociality.

I argue that for Emmanuel, humanitarian mission and community life are sites dedicated to the dialogical transformation of the self, an effort centered on the intentional establishment of controlled social friction and the creation of opportunities for empathy; and further, that these processes are anchored in the disruption, decentering and reorientation of the self in relation to the divine and to social others. This explicit identification of the locus of self-transformation in the social, and Emmanuel’s orientation to change more broadly, are achieved and shaped by the mediation or insertion of the divine into human sociality. This mediation seeks to establish, and is based in the experience of the divine as not only transcendent to the world but as also powerfully immanent in it. Making these arguments, the dissertation intervenes in key debates in the contemporary anthropology of Christianity, the anthropological critique of humanitarianism, and anthropological debates on empathy, intersubjectivity, and self-transformation.

Prevention Through Deterrence is a Customs and Border Patrol immigration policy that focuses on weaponizing the natural landscapes of the southern border in order to prevent migration by “funneling” migrants into “hostile terrain” meant to injure and kill (U.S. Customs and Border Patrol 1994). The stated goal of this policy is not only to prevent migration through deaths in hostile terrain like deserts and bodies of water, but to prevent migration through fear of the hostile terrain that must be traversed, and the inevitable risk. While Prevention Through Deterrence is an immigration enforcement policy that is literally about weaponizing the physical landscape, this philosophical approach to preventing immigration plays out in many contexts in U.S. immigration and asylum processes, including in bureaucratic and administrative contexts. I examine additional ways in which migrants’ entry to the United States and migrants' rights to live are prevented by the U.S. immigration regime through forms of systematic deterrence that weaponize fear and death, as well as temporality and opacity. Specifically, the Employment Authorization Document asylum time clock is a site to consider the bureaucratic extension of the philosophy and practice of Prevention Through Deterrence. I argue the Employment Authorization Document time clock is an intentional deterrence to residency and to life, playing out in conceptual and in corporeal ways in the lives and bodies of asylum seekers. What do these bodies and the violence they endure tell us about the culture of the U.S. immigration regime? In critically analyzing the culture of this regime I examine that which is structurally fundamental to the functioning of such a system, including xenophobia, racism, fear, and violence.

The thesis titled An Understanding of the New Age Through the Lens of an Embodied Experience of the Sacred is a work of anthropological character which aims to explain how the New Age phenomenon manifests in the context of globalization.

From an Anthropological stance, the New Age is a cultural phenomenon of religious connotation. It is part of a process of Globalization of Religion in the context of a Global Religious System. The New Age phenomenon is embodied throughout the deterritorialized trajectories of its spiritual foragers in a quest for an experience of the Sacred as Otherness. The consequence of these trajectories is an intertwined rhizome configured by a complex interconnection of eclectic elements gravitating around the experience of the sacred in a global society.

These concepts are used to demonstrate how the New Age manifests in the embodied experience of persons in concrete local contexts, maintaining a constant dialogue with the global dimension of the New Age. Three particular cases are analyzed regarding this objective: Aztec Dancing, Neomayanism and Deoceltism, and Neoshamanism.

In late October of 2018, the Department of Homeland Security’s sudden termination of its program, where ICE would “transport the traveling asylum seekers directly to the departure points for their prearranged mode of transportation […] facilitating an orderly release process.” (Rosenburg 2018). DHS officials initially cited partnerships with local governments and NGOs to facilitate this transition; however, a total lack of communication left these organizations scrambling to shelter migrant families while ‘filling the gap’ created by this rescission of the state. In doing so, they knowingly fomented an optics of discord at the border by releasing asylum-seeking families onto the streets while rejecting blame or responsibility by justifying their actions within the language of humanitarian concern (Fassin 2011).

Taking the subsequent emergence of an asylum-seeker’s health screening program as its point of departure, this thesis situates medical humanitarians’ experiences of response and caregiving within a political ethos (Jenkins 2015) of xenophobia manifested in the federal dismantling of the government’s asylum system. This paper mediates cultural phenomenology, literature on citizenship and the state, and ethnographies of transit migration to reformulate a geographically and experientially salient theory of moral wayfaring (Heinemann 2015) within this clinic’s context. Through interviews with the clinicians who helped found this novel health screening program, moral wayfaring facilitates critical examination of medical humanitarians’ challenges addressing the struggles, trauma, and wellbeing of their clients. As such, I investigate the relationship between governance and care at the processual (and exceedingly liminal) threshold between migrant detention and asylum-seeker’s resettlement.