Laura Rivas

Advisor: Cindi Katz

Laura Rivas is a doctoral student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She completed her Master’s degree in Geography at The Ohio State University, where she researched the connection between migration, citizenship regimes and labor models in the Dominican Republic (D.R.). As a doctoral student, her work delves into the ways in which migration and nation-building are mutually constitutive of one another. She is specifically interested in using the problem of mobile bodies to think differently about the Dominican nation as an apparently territorially stable object of analysis. Rather than approach the D.R. as a territorial ‘given’, She intends to investigate the ways in which mobile bodies disclose the productions of space and populations that constitute the D.R. as a state. Investigating mobility in this sense challenges the idea of the nation as something static and rigid, and indeed unmasks the too often taken-for-granted inside/outside, as well as the self/other, mapping of statehood as an ongoing project predicated on the scrutiny and pathologization of ‘others’ deemed threatening and/or out-of-place.