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Miriam Ticktin

Miriam Ticktin - Associate Professor - profile photo

Research Interests

  • Anthropology of the human, humanitarianism, more-than-human; migration, mobility, borders and walls; sexual violence/gender-based violence
  • Anthropology of science, medicine, ethics, and transnational feminist theory; commoning, political imagination and speculative futures; France/Europe/North Africa

Education

  • Ph.D. 2002, Stanford University and École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)

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Affiliated Campus(es)

  • CUNY Graduate Center

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She came to the GC in 2022 from the New School for Social Research, where she was Chair of Anthropology from 2016-2018, Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility [newschool.edu] between 2013-2016 and Director of Gender Studies from 2012-2013. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Miriam was an Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan from 2004-2008, and before that, she held a postdoctoral position in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.

Miriam’s research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity, although her current research is more interested in imagining and opening the way to new political formations. She has written on immigration, humanitarianism, and border walls in France and the US, and how bodies and biologies are shaped by gender, race and class. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (UC Press, 2011), co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (with Ilana Feldman, Duke UP 2010), and she was a founding co-editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. She has been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Between 2017-19, she co-directed (with Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and Victoria Hattam) the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Imaginative Mobilities” at The New School.

Ticktin is finishing a book entitled “Beyond Innocence,” which explores the political work done by the concept of innocence, tracking how, in the Euro-American context, discourses and images of innocence get assembled and weaponized across the fields of immigration, gender politics, racial politics and environmentalism, and used to decide why and how we should care, for whom, and whose lives matter. She argues that claims to innocence end up perpetuating inequality, violence and exclusion; instead she elaborates on a non-innocent, abolitionist future, where inter-relationality is key, and where a world without borders and private property is already being experimented with. She is also currently at work on another book tracing two opposing political processes: containment (border walls and technologies, quarantining) and commoning (translocal processes of mutuality, respect and sharing, that dispense with private property, and work towards no borders worlds).

Recent Publications

Books:

  • 2011   Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011(co-winner of the 2012 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, Society for the Anthropology of Europe)
  • 2010   In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, Co-Edited with Ilana Feldman, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010

Special Issues of Journals: 

  • 2022     Co-Editor (with Rafi Youatt) of Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Law and Earth “Intersecting Mobilities” Borderlands 21 (1): January 2022.
  • 2017   Guest editor of Social Research: An International Quarterly, "The Invasive Other."  84 (1): Spring 2017.
  • 2012   Co-editor (with Nehal Bhuta and Sakiko Fukuda Parr) of special issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly on “Human Rights and the Global Economy.” 79 (4): Winter 2012

Peer reviewed articles, chapters and essays:

Miriam Ticktin - Associate Professor - profile photo

Contact

Affiliated Campus(es)

  • CUNY Graduate Center