Susan Bibler Coutin

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. She also directs the UCI Center in Law, Society and Culture. 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. Susan Coutin's current research examines the experiences of 1.5 generation migrants, that is, individuals who were born in El Salvador but raised in the United States. Through interviews with 1.5 generation Salvadorans in Southern California and in El Salvador, this project explores the power and limitations of nation-based categories of membership.