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Dr. Miranda Cady Hallett, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of Human Rights Studies, is a legal anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in El Salvador since 1998 and with Salvadoran immigrant communities in the U.S. since 2004. Her interests, training and expertise lie at the intersection of Latin American studies (with a particular focus on El Salvador and the Central American region), migration studies and border theory, law and society, labor studies and the history and anthropology of state violence.

She has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Latino Studies, Geopolitics, Citizenship Studies and Law and Social Inquiry.

Dr. Hallett is an engaged public anthropologist with a commitment to human rights and social justice, and works to incorporate opportunities for community engagement and social action into her teaching and service.

Research interests

Dr. Hallett’s research specializations include:

• Human rights and state violence
• Subjectivity and rights
• Law and political economy
• Central American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Cultural geography
• Law and citizenship
• Migration and its regulation:

In addition to providing commentary to public media when available, Dr. Hallett serves occasionally as expert witness in humanitarian cases in U.S. immigration courts.

Dr. Hallett can provide brief explanatory lectures to community groups or in public educational spaces on any of the following:

• Ways to Talk About Immigration and Immigrants: Discussing value-based ways to dialogue with neighbors and friends about immigration’s positive side in today’s polarized political context, and why it’s important for immigrants’ basic human rights
• Immigration Law 101: The legal differences between various basic forms of immigration status, and the broad history of laws covering immigrants, temporary workers, refugees and asylum seekers from the 19th century to the present day
• Whose Crisis? Central America and the US-Mexico Border: causes and consequences of displacement and migration from Central America in the 21st century
• Human Movement: Migration in anthropological perspective

Selected publications

“Labor, Discipline, and Resistance: transnational migrant workers ‘on the line.’” 2017. Journal of Working Class Studies 2 (1): pp. 24-42.

“Temporary Protection, Enduring Contradiction: the contested and contradictory meanings of temporary immigration status.” 2014. Law & Social Inquiry, 39: 621–642

“Deferred Deportation, Community Transformation: dynamics of place-identification and legal exclusion in rural Arkansas.” 2013. In Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland. Linda Allegro and Andrew Grant Wood, editors. University of Illinois Press

“Better than White Trash: race, class, and moral capital in the new Latino South” In Latino Studies Vol. X Issues 1-2. Spring/Summer 2012.

“Diasporic Suffrage: voting rights in the Salvadoran trans-nation.” Co-written with Beth Baker-Cristales. In Urban Anthropology, Vol. 39, Nos. 1-2. Spring and Summer 2010.