Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology
Ph.D., Stanford University
(949) 824-1447
scoutin@uci.edu
3301 Social Ecology II
Department:
Criminology, Law and Society
Specializations:
law, culture, immigration, human rights, citizenship, political activism, Central America
Susan Bibler Coutin holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and is professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research has examined social, political, and legal activism surrounding immigration issues, particularly immigration from El Salvador to the United States. Her first book, THE CULTURE OF PROTEST: RELIGIOUS ACTIVISM AND THE U.S. SANCTUARY MOVEMENT (Westview 1993) analyzed how congregations that declared themselves “sanctuaries” for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees constructed a means and a language of protesting U.S. refugee and foreign policy in the 1980s. Her second book, LEGALIZING MOVES: SALVADORAN IMMIGRANTS’ STRUGGLE FOR U.S. RESIDENCY (U. Michigan Press, 2000), analyzed how Salvadoran immigrants negotiated their legal identities in the United States in the 1990s, a period characterized by immigration reform in the U.S. and post-war reconstruction in El Salvador. Her third book, NATIONS OF EMIGRANTS: SHIFTING BOUNDARIES OF CITIZENSHIP IN EL SALVADOR AND THE UNITED STATES (Cornell University Press, 2007), considers how current forms of migration challenge conventional understandings of borders, citizenship, and migration itself. NATIONS OF EMIGRANTS is based on interviews with policymakers and activists in El Salvador and the United States as well as on Salvadoran emigrants’ accounts of their journeys to the United States, their lives in the U.S., and, in some cases, their removal to El Salvador. Her fourth book, EXILED HOME: SALVADORAN TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH IN THE AFTERMATH OF VIOLENCE (Duke University Press, 2016) examines the experiences of 1.5 generation migrants, that is, individuals who were born in El Salvador but raised in the United States. Based on interviews with 1.5 generation Salvadorans in Southern California and in El Salvador, this book explores the power and limitations of nation-based categories of membership. Her most recent book DOCUMENTING IMPOSSIBLE REALITIES: ETHNOGRAPHY, MEMORY AND THE AS IF,”coauthored with Barbara Yngvesson, was published by Cornell University Press in 2023. She recently completed NSF-funded research regarding how the production, retrieval, and circulation of records and files figures in immigrants’ efforts to secure legal status in the United States. In collaboration with Sameer Ashar, Jennifer Chacon, and Stephen Lee, she is completing a book project based on research entitled, “Navigating Liminal Legalities along Pathways to Citizenship: Immigrant Vulnerability and the Role of Mediating Institutions.” Their co-authored book LEGAL PHANTOMS: EXECUTIVE RELIEF AND THE HAUNTING FAILURES OF U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. With Walter Nicholls, she is currently carrying out an NSF-funded project entitled, “Immigration Dimensions of Local Governance: Municipalities, Neighborhoods, and Citizenship.”
Web Links of Research Sites
- UC Irvine Law and Ethnography Lab: https://sites.uci.edu/ethnographylab/
Other Web Links
- Documenting Impossible Realities by Susan Coutin and Barbara Yngvesson: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501768880/documenting-impossible-realities/#bookTabs=1
- Navigating Liminal Legalities along Pathways to Citizenship Report: http://www.russellsage.org/research/reports/navigating-liminal-legalitie…