Martha Balaguera

Martha Balaguera’s scholarship focuses on collective political struggles in violent contexts, with an emphasis on transborder forms of activism in the Americas from a feminist perspective. 

Her book project (in progress) theorizes the transnational carceral regime of sovereignty that spans the Mesoamerican migration corridor. She also examines how people on the ground, especially women, LGBTQ+ movements, and grassroots communities respond with everyday practices of care and political organizing to forced displacement, confinement and intensified border enforcement in the context of transit migration across Mexico. 

Currently, Martha is conducting new research on how networks of legal accompaniment and refugees are shaping international asylum law and contesting the detention-deportation regime at the US-Mexico border.

Martha's recent work has been published in Signs: Journal for Women in Culture and Society (2018), and her co-authored op-eds have appeared in NACLA (2018) and Border Criminologies (2019).