At the Margins: A Digital Humanities Framework for Integrating Social and Scientific Approaches to Forced Migration and Deaths at the U.S.-México Border

Bridget Algee-Hewitt argues that because contemporary immigration is a complex social justice issue—deeply intertwined with cultural, political, and biological factors, and marked by the harsh, often overlooked reality of missing and deceased forced migrants—actionable and impactful insights demand an approach that crosses disciplinary borders. She demonstrates how, when social and scientific methods are unified within a Digital Humanities (DH) framework, we can better expose overlooked complexities, human costs, and systemic factors driving border deaths, thereby transcending traditional research silos and providing a more holistic understanding of this critical humanitarian crisis.

About the Speaker

Bridget Algee-Hewitt, PhD, is a computational biologist and anthropologist, whose research interrogates the hierarchies of identity ingrained within our immigration, medical, and legal systems and explores their relationships to displacement, poverty, and violence among marginalized communities, especially in transborder spaces of the U.S. and across Latin America, from data science, biological, and social perspectives. Algee-Hewitt has published extensively on the crisis of deaths along the U.S.-México border and among vulnerable communities in Latin America, the technical estimation of biological parameters in archeological and forensic contexts, and the application of NLP to questions of code-switching and racialized language in public, social media, industry, academic, educational, legal, policy, and business discourse.  Algee-Hewitt is a passionate advocate for refugee and immigrant rights, initiatives to improve justice response for the disappeared, and trauma resources for survivors of human trafficking and exploitation in the U.S. In the field, she helps to identify missing and unknown persons by providing forensic casework analyses and she delivers expert testimony for asylum petitions and policy.

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Lunch will begin at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees.