Join us for the CESTA Tuesday lunch seminar on November 5th, from 12:00 to 1:15 pm, featuring Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Senior Associate Director for the Research Center at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. Her talk, titled "En La Frontera, Navigating Life and Death on the Edge," will delve into the lived experiences and structural vulnerabilities faced by migrants seeking safety and stability in the United States. The session will examine both the humanitarian crisis at the border and the sociopolitical landscape that shapes today’s immigration policies and discourses. In addition to exploring the conditions that force migrants into perilous journeys, this talk will introduce recent advances in biospatial data utilization. These data-driven insights, derived from geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analytics, enable researchers to map migration patterns with unprecedented precision and to visualize the geographic and environmental risks facing migrants. RSVP for lunch or to receive the Zoom link here.

Through this presentation, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the structural and physical violence shaping migration, the humanitarian stakes, and how biospatial data offers a clearer view into the realities of migration and border policies. This event provides an opportunity for open conversation, fostering the critical dialogue necessary for building a more humane, democratic approach to immigration in the United States.

About the Speaker

Dr. Bridget F.B. Algee-Hewitt is a computational biologist and anthropologist, whose research interrogates the hierarchies of identity ingrained within our immigration, medical, and legal systems and explores their relationships to displacement, poverty, and violence among marginalized communities, especially in transborder spaces of the U.S. and across Latin America.  As a data scientist, she develops new computational techniques in ML, AI, and NLP to decompose complex patterns of human biology and behavior at scale, building models that leverage genetic, skeletal, linguistic, life-history, and social-context information to shed light on past and present histories.  As a forensic biologist, she studies how skeletal and genetic traits vary among contemporary peoples across space and through time to help her identify missing and unknown persons, providing forensic casework support especially along La Frontera. She also delivers expert testimony for asylum petitions and policy. She has long served as an educator and expert case consultant for human rights and law enforcement agencies internationally and domestically.

Dr. Algee-Hewitt has published extensively on the crisis of deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border and among vulnerable communities in Latin America, the technical estimation of biological parameters in archeological and forensic contexts, and the application of NLP to questions of code-switching and racialized language in public, social media, industry, academic, educational, legal, policy, and business discourse. She has held faculty appointments, directorships, and  distinguished scholar fellowships at institutions worldwide, and she is the recipient of numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, Department of Defense, National Institute of Health, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council among others. Her recent volumes include The Reality of the Dead in Brazil (2023), Changing the Landscape of Identity in Forensic Anthropology (2022), and Remodeling Forensic Skeletal Age (2021).