Ieva Jusionyte
Biography
Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Professor in Security Studies at Brown University. A legal and medical anthropologist, she is the author of three books, including multiple award-winning ethnographies Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018) and Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (2024). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Fulbright Program and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. In addition to academic publications, Jusionyte has written about her research for The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone, among others, and discussed it broadly in the media, including on BBC, CNN and NPR. She is a member of the Advisory Committee of Global Action on Gun Violence and the Research Network to Prevent Gun Violence in the Americas, and the editor of the California Series in Public Anthropology.
Research
Jusionyte’s scholarship explores the conceptual and material relationship between the state and various forms of violence. She uses ethnography as a method and a form of storytelling to examine the narratives, aesthetics, and practices that underlie security.
Based on fieldwork with Argentine news journalists and with Mexican and American emergency responders, her first two books examine the power asymmetries that underlie the legal and political construction of threats and the manifold social effects these discourses, policies, and practices have in communities where they are applied. The first one, "Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border" (University of California Press 2015), focused on the production of knowledge about crime and representation of security as a process that is scalar and contested, in which journalists play a role in defining the meanings of both crime and security. Her second book, "Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border" (University of California Press, 2018), shifted to the materiality of security, particularly the importance of terrain, both the built environment and natural topography, in facilitating social and physical injury as two braided modalities of state violence. Both books approached state violence through the ethnographic and analytic focus on work — that of journalists and emergency responders — and the ethical, political, and legal dilemmas that workers grapple with because of their professional mandates.
Jusionyte’s latest book, "Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border" (University of California Press 2024), follows firearms that circulate in the binational space between the United States and Mexico, both as policy objects and cultural artifacts. It is as much a cultural history of guns in two neighboring countries that share the legacies of colonialism and frontier violence as an analysis of the politics and economics that perpetuate the vicious circle of violence on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Publications
2024 Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border. University of California Press. 348 p.
2024 “The Virus and the Border: Reflections on the Experiences of Emergency Responders in Southern Arizona.” In Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities. Katherine R. Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan, eds. University of California Health Humanities Press. Pp. 251-259.
2021. Jusionyte, Ieva. “Violence Exchange.” In Anthropology Now 13(1): 49-54.
2020. Jusionyte, Ieva. "Writing in and from the Field." In Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment, C. McGranahan, ed. Durham: Duke University Press.
2020. Jusionyte, Ieva. "’We All Have the Same Red Blood’: Security Aesthetics and Rescue Ethics on the Arizona-Sonora Border." In Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Urban Imaginary, D. A. Ghertner, D. M. Goldstein, and H. McFann, eds. Durham: Duke University Press. Pp. 87-113.
2018. Jusionyte, Ieva. Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 296 p.