Composed of three articles, this dissertation examines the development of a transdisciplinary and community-engaged research partnership developed to address longstanding and undocumented concerns about agricultural health hazards among residents of an unincorporated farmworker community. Article I connects the literature on risk studies and environmental justice by using participant-led focus groups to examine residential perceptions of risk among white and Mexican-origin residents. It finds that residents of the case study community are acutely aware of contamination at the local level through their knowledge about the sources, fate and transport, and consequences of human exposure to environmental and occupational hazards. My findings substantiate claims that disadvantaged communities are often exposed to so much pollution that any sense of uncertainty about being exposed is all but extinguished, leading to a collective sense of toxic certainty. Implications of this research demonstrate the importance of participatory research and qualitative methods for uncovering rich community insights that could help guide the creation of risk communication policies founded in the knowledge, understanding, and potential barriers faced by target audiences. Article II further connects risk studies and environmental justice scholarship through the use of participant observation and focus groups to explain why and how environmental inequality, in this case living near agricultural hazards, is maintained in a farmworker community. It demonstrates the ubiquity and necessity of agricultural hazards, which leads residents to perceive a need for science information and government support to navigate the path toward environmental justice. Results highlight how contextual (place-based) and institutional resources serve to produce an ambiguous climate for community responses to environmental inequality, thus relegating risk management to the household and individual levels. Article III critically examines the development of our transdisciplinary and community-based partnerships. It recommends that, to best support communities, transdisciplinary environmental justice research should (a) reflect residents’ needs and concerns, (b) respect local ways of knowing and unknowing, and (c) produce notable outcomes for the community. This research addresses a significant gap in the environmental justice literature that has extensively interrogated agricultural hazards, which are predominantly experienced by Latinx farmworkers in the United States. Lessons learned from this research provide environmental justice scholars with a framework from which to engage with scholars of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to examine complex environmental problems alongside disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. In turn, this work adds to the transdisciplinary research scholarship through an innovative approach to environmental inequality at the community level. Using community-based and transdisciplinary approaches to operationalize the concepts of environmental justice advances the field, whereas the bulk of scholarship has focused on single-discipline approaches.

In this article-based dissertation, I present three distinct but interrelated articles to expose the harms that immigration detention inflicts on immigrants, their families, and communities. My dissertation, “Life Under Detention: Understanding the Consequences of Heightened Immigration Enforcement on Immigrants, Families, and Communities,” analyzes 34 months of ethnographic data and 95 qualitative interviews with detainees and their family members to investigate how the legal construction of “illegality” has been weaponized against immigrants in the contemporary United States. The dissertation’s introduction frames the rise of “crimmigration” and engages with previous literature on the construction of immigrant exclusion and legal violence against immigrants. This chapter also presents the research questions, introduces the theoretical innovations of the empirical chapters, summarizes the research methodology, and outlines the structure of the dissertation. Chapter two chronicles the experiences of former detainees and how they were able to acquire (or not acquire) justice through multiple means. I argue that immigrants are routinely denied access to justice within the immigration legal system because they are deprived of fundamental support including legal counsel, language translation, and access to the law library. To win their freedom from detention, immigrants engaged in precarious legal patchworking, where they haphazardly cobbled together legal resources and assistance from multiple sources including pro-bono aid, jailhouse lawyers, and other detainees. In chapter three, published in the journal of Law & Society Review, I address the question: How do immigrant families experience the indeterminate confinement of detained loved ones under the intensified threat of deportation? I find that family units endure collateral consequences when they are suspended in a heightened state of liminality due to their loved one’s indeterminate detention. A conceptual contribution of this chapter is the development of collective liminality to show how being suspended in this state of purgatory harms both detained immigrants and their loved ones. In chapter four, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, I demonstrate how intensive state surveillance creates a condition of “extended punishment” that shapes the daily experiences of immigrants shackled to an electronic monitor (EM). The EM marks its wearer with a criminal stigma, leading that person to become shunned, including by previously supportive members of their co-ethnic community. Under this regime, EMs become tools of legal violence that yield a new axis of stratification among immigrants. Because EMs unequally allocate autonomy, privacy, and resources, wearers find themselves more vulnerable and constrained than other immigrants. In chapter five, I conclude by synthesizing the analyses, reflecting on the contributions and implications of the dissertation, and offering directions for future research. Foremost, I am proud to give voice to immigrant detainees and their families whose experiences are important for future scholarship. Overall, my research finds that life in and after detention continues to be shaped by the apparatus of immigration detention. Former detainees suffer the repercussions of trauma and material hardship long after release, and the harms of detention radiate out to many more people than just the detained.