After seven years of exploring the topics of race, detention and indigeneity, Loyola Marymount University professor and anthropologist Emma Shaw Crane brought her dissertation to academics, faculty and students across Gainesville Thursday.
Building on her work in Bogota, Colombia, and Oakland, California, Crane found herself in Homestead — a southern suburb of Miami — continuing her study of how racialized violence is reproduced through spatial arrangements.
Crane started Thursday’s speaking tour at the A. Quinn Jones Museum & Cultural Center for “Research Justice: A Workshop on Collaboration,” a workshop involving several academic figures from the University of Florida involving redistributing research capacities throughout the university and community.
The tour ended at the Smathers Library on the UF campus, in front of a crowd of students and faculty members involved in the UF Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where Crane ultimately presented much of her research from the past decade.
“Being here as someone who studies Florida and works with community organizers in Florida and learns so much from people in Florida, it is a huge privilege and really exciting to be at what really is the flagship public institution of Florida, and I think has produced so many incredible thinkers,” Crane said.
Crane’s speeches Thursday were part of Speaker Series 2023-24 titled “Scales of Belonging,” a production from the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere that previously featured University of Chicago history professor Dipesh Chakrabarty and University of Texas history professor Leonard N. Moore.
Crane was the final speaker in the series.
Throughout the presentation at Smathers Library, she spoke on her experiences observing the Homestead Temporary Shelter, a migrant youth detention camp, and how she researched militarism and incarceration throughout South Florida.
Having only arrived in Gainesville at midnight Thursday, Crane discussed her interest in being able to spend more time exploring similar research topics across Florida aside from her experience in Homestead.
“Migrant detention and militarism, thinking about confinement and policing and militarism are issues that of course happen everywhere. And so, I would love to learn more about that here [Gainesville],” Crane said.
Crane’s efforts were part of the dissertation she wrote while most of the past decade as a PhD student in American Studies at New York University before becoming a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University.
Her work in the fields of research justice, environmental racism and more has since been published in the academic journals Antipode as well as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Public Culture.
Currently, Crane works as an assistant professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at LMU.
Her travel to Gainesville helped to promote the research that she has been developing into a book project on the Homestead Temporary Shelter and how its population of migrant children and workers interact and develop in the detention camp.
Jaime Ahlberg, director for the UF Center for the Humanities and Public Sphere, who just took over the position for the 2023-24 academic year, took note of student responses to Crane’s contribution to the Speaker Series.
“I've had very positive feedback from students, including my students in philosophy classes, who have come to some of these events because they really broaden the kind of perspective that one can take on themes that we all have seen represented in the public sphere, but maybe not in that way,” Ahlberg said.
Ahlberg now looks forward to next year’s Speaker Series 2024-25, with plans in mind for how to continue the communal interest in the Center for the Humanities and Public Sphere’s keynote series, although not revealing many details of the center’s planned events.
“We're working toward organizing next year's [speaker series],”Ahlberg said. “We have a theme in mind, and then we're looking around the country and sometimes internationally for renowned scholars who can speak to that theme in different ways.”
With several months before the next Speaker Series will kick off, students and faculty in attendance for Thursday’s “Scales of Belonging” event can look into Crane’s words and further research to learn more about the world of race, indigeneity, and migrant detention.
