Nicholas Rodrigo (2022)

Nick Rodrigo is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY where he is currently writing his PhD thesis titled “Wielding The Border: A genealogy of US-Mexico borderland practices and the purposes they serve from conquest to today”.  Through the construction of a robust theoretical lens, archival research and qualitative investigation in the US borderlands he will trace how the practices of bordering has evolved, and the central purpose the serve to t the US state projects of racial capitalism and the expansion of the security state.

Nick is a founding member of the Social Anatomy of Deportation Regime at John Jay college, where he has coordinated their public events and research projects since its establishment in 2018. He has written several op-eds and book chapters on the state of US-Mexico borderland violence and the nature of detention and deportation proceedings in the US, as well as producing a podcast on the deportation regime in the US called “They Are Just Deportees”. His forthcoming podcast “These Bordering Scars” will examine the socio-political history of the US-Mexico borderland violence and will be published in the Fall of 2022. Nick also teaches courses on prison/police/border abolition and immigration at John Jay College and leads the qualitative section of a large NSF funded project concerning criminal deportations in New York City.