Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies

Pedro Valdez Castro is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. His research and professional work focus on international migration, migration and border policies, development and governance, and ethnoracial dynamics in Latin America and the Caribbean. His research examines how migration and border regimes intersect with broader processes of social change, human (im)mobility, and development, and how these processes shape people’s aspirations, experiences, and possibilities for the future. His current research project examines the relationship between emigration aspirations, life projects, and expanded access to higher education among young adults amid broader developmental transformations in the Dominican Republic as well as the socioeconomic, cultural, and affective dimensions of these phenomena.

Before joining Brown, Pedro worked at the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researched evolving U.S. border policies and Afro-Caribbean migration across the Western Hemisphere and the U.S.-Mexico border. He also worked at the National Institute of Migration of the Dominican Republic, providing evidence-based technical assistance to state institutions across the executive and legislative branches. As a social scientist, Pedro seeks to produce research that advances scholarly knowledge while contributing to more just and effective approaches to migration governance and development in the region.