Research expertise: international migration, immigration detention, law and society, race and ethnicity

Mirian Martinez-Aranda, UCI assistant professor of sociology, studies the social, material, and health consequences of immigration detention and surveillance on immigrants, families, and communities. Using qualitative methods, she looks at how immigration status is used by the state to stratify, surveil, and exclude immigrants, their families, and their communities. Her current work focuses on how surveillance technologies such as GPS monitoring and facial recognition apps are employed by immigration enforcement to impact immigrants and their families’ well-being. She also studies how immigration detention is detrimental to family cohesion.

Her findings, funded by the National Science Foundation and several institutional fellowships, have been published in Law & Society Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and in Social Problems with forthcoming works in Immigration Detention and Social Harm, Routledge Edited Collection and in the American Behavioral Scientist journal.

 

 

Martinez-Aranda earned her bachelor’s in Latin American studies and film studies at UC Berkeley, and her master’s and Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA. Prior to joining UCI, she was a visiting scholar in the Global Migration Center and a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology, both at UC Davis. She’s excited to be joining UCI’s Department of Sociology which has produced groundbreaking research in multiple fields - including immigration - that has helped shape public policy. She’s looking forward to the potential for collaboration across disciplines and working with UCI’s many diverse and talented students and faculty members.