Dominic and Cymene wonder whether there isn’t some way to make the academic job market experience slightly less spirit-killing on this week’s podcast. Then (14:36) we are most fortunate to get U Michigan anthropologist Jason De León (http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com) on the phone to talk about his book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (U California Press 2015) and its exploration of “desert necroviolence” in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. We talk about the long-standing U.S. “prevention through deterrence” border policy, its use of landscape as weapon, how multispecies relations and nonhuman forces factored so significantly into the story of migration he wanted to tell, and whether the Trump regime has altered previous patterns of necroviolence. We discuss governmental discourse on the desert as killer, the materiality and industry of undocumented border migration, the phenomenology of migration and why migrants often say it’s impossible to go back. We ask Jason how climate change is figuring into his current comparative work on undocumented migration and he explains how the film Sleep Dealer may be more than science fiction. We close by talking about his new photoessay project on Honduran smugglers and hypermasculinity and why working with artistic collaborators is such an important strategy for reaching a wider public.
