Event
Forum of Migration: DACA and the Limits of Citizenship
This event is hosted by the Wolf Humanities Center and is co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.
On July 16, 2021, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from approving new applications for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, putting the program’s future in peril. While this development was jolting for immigrant communities, it was not unexpected. World-renowned scholar of the lives of immigrants in the United States and author of the landmark book Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America, Roberto Gonzales argues that time limited and partial statuses like DACA endow their beneficiaries with a duality of experiences – of both security and vulnerability. While tension between these competing experiences remains unresolved, control over one’s circumstances is often shaded if not threatened by hostile and exclusionary contexts.
The Wolf Humanities Center is Penn’s main hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming. Our goals are to demonstrate how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society, and how fundamentally connected they are with many areas of urgent inquiry in medicine, law, business, and the sciences.