Contact Information
607 S Mathews Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Alana is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also completing a graduate minor in Gender and Women's Studies. Her research examines refuge and violence across borders in the Global South. Her current research project ethnographically documents Colombian refugees’ experiences of persecution, criminalization, and displacement in Ecuador, a space of purported refuge. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Hays Program and the Social Science Research Council, among others. She holds an M.A. in Anthropology from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador, and a B.A. in Spanish from Tufts University.
Research Interests
Migration, asylum, and refuge; critical refugee studies; forced displacement and armed conflict; Latin America; Ecuador and Colombia
Research Description
Alana’s current research project engages the questions: How do refugees from Colombia in Ecuador experience and navigate refuge? When attending to refugees’ lived experiences in spaces of purported refuge, what forms of violence come to light? And how do refugees navigate and contest various intersecting forms of violence in their everyday lives in Ecuador? Based on long-term ethnographic research, including participant observation, interviews, and digital communication, this project contends that refuge is not synonymous with safety, security, or protection. Rather, this project demonstrates how violence is integral to the experience of refuge, through an ethnography of the persecution, criminalization, and displacement that Colombian refugees navigate in Ecuador, as well as the forms of care work and strategies of (im)mobility they enact in response to such violence.
Grants
2024-2025 Graduate Student Fellowship, Humanities Research Institute, UIUC
2023-2024 Peace Scholar Award, United States Institute of Peace
Spring 2023 Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Anthropology Department, UIUC
2020 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad
2020 Dissertation Travel Grant, Graduate College, UIUC
2020 Kilby Fellowship, Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS), UIUC
2016 Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, Social Science Research Council
2016 Whitten Fellowship, CLACS, UIUC
2015 Tinker Foundation Fellowship, CLACS, UIUC
2015 Summer Research Grant, Anthropology Department, UIUC
Awards and Honors
2024: Demitri B. Shimkin Award, for the paper, “Five Machete Slashes, Tirar la Toalla, and Seguir Adelante: Refugee Injury and Care in States of Racialized Abandonment,” Anthropology Department, UIUC
2023: Prize for Research in the Humanities, for the paper, “‘I Hope They Don’t Find Me Here: Persecution, Encuentros, and Refuge Across Borders in the Global South,” Humanities Research Institute, UIUC
2023: Graduate Student Award in Applied and Public Anthropology, for the paper, “Resettlement Denied: Persecution, Refuge, and the Violent Entrapment of Colombian Refugees in Quito, Ecuador,” the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
2021: Mary Jane Neer Scholarship, Disability Resources & Educational Services, UIUC
2020: Teachers Ranked as Outstanding, UIUC
Highlighted Publications
2025. “Cripping Ethnography: Disability, Unruly Movement, and the Doing of Anthropology.” In The Disabled Anthropologist, edited by Anna Jaysane-Darr and Sumi Colligan. New York: Routledge.
2025. “Intimate War Across Borders: Terrifying Encounters, Recognition, and ‘the Colombian Armed Conflict’ in Quito, Ecuador,” American Anthropologist 127 (1): 96-107. http://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28043
2024. “Everything I Have Seen There, That I Know...”: Witnessing the Colombian Armed Conflict Through Refugees’ Narratives of Implication." Political and Legal Anthropology Review 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12567
2022, June 28. “For Colombians in Ecuador, Displacement is Ongoing, and Refuge is Elusive.” North American Congress on Latin America: https://nacla.org/colombians-ecuador-displacement-ongoing-and-refuge-el…
2020, June 15. “Displaced in Place: On Being Forced to Move and Forced to Stay During a Global Pandemic.” In Gabriela Manley, Bryan M. Dougan, and Carole McGranahan (Eds.), American Ethnologist website: https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/making-sense…
2014. La ley, el orden y el caos: construcción social del Estado y el inmigrante en Ecuador. Quito: Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales: https://editorial.iaen.edu.ec/libros/la-ley-el-orden-y-el-caos-construc…