Dr. Bertha Bermúdez Tapia.

Featured Speaker on November 30, 2023, 5:30 p.m.

"Devolution at the Border: The Worsening of Violence, and the Erasure of Asylum"

Bertha Bermúdez Tapia is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the New Mexico State University. Bertha received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research has been funded by the Mexican National Science Foundation and the Tinker Foundation. Bertha's research focuses on two main areas: the impacts of state power on migrant and border lives, and the production and reproduction of violence, especially on the U.S-Mexico border. Her areas of expertise include race and ethnic relations, the social dimensions of immigration policies and undocumented migration. Bertha has been working with the local migrant shelters at the Texas-Tamaulipas border since 2016 and with the Matamoros and Reynosa migrant camps since 2019. She specializes in qualitative methods. In addition to standard ethnographic techniques, her work engages with participant photography, where research participants document their social environment, and the use of drone and camera images as photographic evidence to create interacting mappings that record sites, forms, and conditions of migrant camps.