Alana Ackerman (she/her) is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Her current research examines armed conflict, violence, displacement, and the state across borders in the Global South. Ackerman’s research interests include migration, asylum, and refuge; critical refugee studies; forced displacement and armed conflict; Latin America; Ecuador; and Colombia.
Ackerman’s current book project considers how refugees navigate violence and displacement in spaces of purported refuge. This project documents the widespread persecution that Colombian refugees navigate, in both Colombia and Ecuador, before and after the signing of the 2016 peace accords between the Colombian government and certain factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Based on twelve months of formal ethnographic research, including participant observation and interviews, as well as nearly two decades of life experience in Ecuador, Ackerman’s book project contends that violence is integral to refuge, and demonstrates this through an ethnography of refugees’ subjection to, and contestations of, cross-border persecution, state power, and anti-Black and anti-Colombian racism. This project contributes to fields of scholarship such as the anthropology of refuge and critical refugee studies by challenging commonsense understandings of armed conflict, violence, safety, and the state.
Ackerman’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Hays Program and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. She is the author of articles which have appeared in American Anthropologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, North American Congress on Latin America, and elsewhere. Ackerman holds a PhD in Anthropology, with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She also holds an MA in Anthropology from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador and a BA in Spanish from Tufts University.