Inés Valdez
- Political Theory
- Immigration
- Latina/o Political Thought
- Critical Race Theory
- American Political Development
Inés Valdez’s research focuses on immigration, democratic theory, and Latina/o political thought. Her dissertation, Deporting Democracy: The Politics of Immigration and Sovereignty, considers the limits that sovereignty and coercive immigration enforcement imposes on immigrants’ political action. Immigrants nonetheless struggle politically against these structures and their activism contains strong democratic potential. Her arguments rely on a political reading of Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitanism and a conception of rights indebted to Jacques Rancière.
Other single and co-authored projects focus on biopolitics and the punitive immigration regime, post-colonial critiques of Republicanism, American political development, as well as the politics of film and photographic representation of immigration.
During the 2011-2012 academic year she will be a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute.
Publications:
2011. “Perpetual What? Injury, Sovereignty, and a Cosmopolitan View of Immigration," Political Studies (forthcoming).
2011. “From Workers to Enemies. National Security, State Building and America’s War on Illegal Immigrants,” (with Desmond King) in Narrating Peoplehood amidst Diversity. Historical and Theoretical Perspectives , ed. Michael Böss (Aarhus: Aarhus Academic Press), pp. 145-182.
2011. “Residues of Border Control” (with Susan Harbage Page), Southern Spaces April 17.
