Alana Ackerman (she/her) is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Her work focuses on the anthropology of migration, refuge, and asylum; critical refugee studies; war and violence; law, bureaucracy, and the state; and critical disability studies.
Alana’s current book project is an ethnography of Colombian refugees’ experiences navigating violence, refuge, law, and bureaucracy between Colombia and Ecuador. She is also working on a second ethnographic research project about contemporary asylum courts in the US.
Alana’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Hays Program and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. Her writing has been published in American Anthropologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, North American Congress on Latin America, and elsewhere.
Alana holds a PhD in Anthropology, with a graduate 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.
Additional Scholarship:
“Cripping Ethnography: Disability, Unruly Movement, and the Doing of Anthropology”