The Portal to Texas History 2026 Research Fellowship Awardee
Madeline Baird
Project Title
Embodied Borders: Navigating Transit Migration and Asylum Access
Project Description
Drawing from multi-sited fieldwork in Chiapas State, Mexico, Darién Province, Panama, and Texas, Baird’s ethnographic research examines the impact of border externalization on migration policies and the journeys of people seeking asylum at the U.S. border. Through inclusion of a critical historical analysis, she examines the origins of the U.S. system of asylum and regimes of border enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. She employs visual ethnographic methods and collaborative ethnography with migrant people to humanize lived experiences crossing borders and to imagine new possibilities for migrant care, protection, and inclusion.
Biography
Madeline Baird is a border scholar and medical anthropologist. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Her doctoral research builds off a decade of engaged community research and public health work in the U.S. and Latin America. Her work has been supported by the Mexico Fulbright Program, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, and Dodd Center for Human Rights and published in Migration Policy Practice, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Social Science & Medicine. She is currently developing a collaborative photobook, En las Manos de Dios (In the Hands of God), that showcases visual representations of border crossings and tactics of deterrence employed to dissuade access to asylum.
