Position Title
ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow
Cecilia Vasquez is an American Council of Learned Societies Postdoctoral Scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021. Her research interrogates the California Values Act and identifies the shortcomings of the policy in protecting undocumented immigrants in the Inland Empire. Her research explores how grassroots organizers developed sanctuary practices for addressing immigrant needs in the Inland Empire. Research interests are citizenship and belonging, prison to ICE pipeline, carceral studies, necropolitics, abolition, and fugitive anthropology.
Cecilia describes herself as a community-based scholar. She seeks to find ways to build bridges between academia and local community through research. Cecilia has led community-art projects, organized conferences, and educational events to discuss issues such as migration and detention. As she is committed to accessibility and decoding academia, she has a book chapter that will be published in 2022 that maps out the challenges and offers tools in accessing funding for community-based research. Cecilia is also the co-founder and co-organizer of the Mapping Academia Series hosted by the Association for Latinx & Latina/o Anthropologists. Each month a different Latinx scholar shares their knowledge and experiences of navigating academia.