Population Studies and Training Center

Argenis’ doctoral dissertation, Documenting Undocumentedness, explores what it means to live “illegality” in everyday life. Based in Arizona’s interior borderlands, the research looks beyond the U.S.–Mexico border to ask how undocumentedness is experienced in the city of Phoenix, in communities and workplaces, in homes, and within intimate relationships of kinship and care. Through ethnography and phenomenology, the project examines how immigration law and state surveillance shape not only where people can go and what they can do, but also how they experience themselves, their relationships, and their everyday lives.