Emma Shaw Crane, "The Periphery Within: War, Labor, and the Camp in the Florida Suburbs," in conversation with Abigail Kahn (CCSRE Graduate Dissertation Fellow)

Learn more about Professor Crane's work in this 2026 press release by Earthjustice, "Another Florida Detention Center Plagued with Toxic Chemicals and Unbreathable Air, According to Report."

Florida has long been a laboratory for the policing and confinement of noncitizens. This talk asks how the war on migrants is spatialized in the suburb. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the agricultural peripheries of Miami, it engages unregulated informal housing and “alternative to detention” surveillance. Migrant agricultural workers in South Miami-Dade often live in trailers, efficiencies, sheds, and auto-constructed structures without formal addresses. Without access to an address, tenants cannot enroll children in school, comply with asylum requirements, or contest unjust eviction. Many of these migrant tenants also participate in the Intensive Surveillance Appearance Program, a federal “alternative to detention program” that tracks and conditions migrant mobility. These diffuse and dispersed forms of spatial containment produce cascading social and political foreclosures for migrant tenant-workers. This talk develops the analytic of the “periphery within” to illuminate a suburban geography of dispossession that operates not through confinement or disappearance but through the private and parceled proliferation of the labor camp.

Emma Shaw Crane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is an ethnographer of war and environment in the Americas. Her current book project, Counterinsurgent Suburb, draws on fieldwork on and surrounding a military base and detention camp for migrant children in South Florida to investigate the environmental and spatial relationships that sustain U.S. war-making. A second ethnographic project, grounded in long-term fieldwork with former combatants in Colombia’s civil war, explores the aftermath of counterinsurgency in peripheral neighborhoods of Bogotá.

Emma received her PhD in American Studies from New York University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, where she was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Before beginning graduate school, she was a Fulbright fellow to the Critical Medical Anthropology Working Group at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá. She received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley.

Emma writes in collaboration with movements for environmental and migrant justice in Florida. A recent project documented exposure to unbreathable air at the Glades County Detention Center, a hybrid county jail and migrant detention center in Florida’s sugarcane growing region.

Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.