Susan Bibler Coutin

UCI School of Social Ecology

Susan Bibler Coutin

Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology
Ph.D., Stanford University
(949) 824-1447
scoutin@uci.edu
3301 Social Ecology II

Department:
Criminology, Law and Society

Specializations:
law, culture, immigration, human rights, citizenship, political activism, Central America

CV

Susan Bibler Coutin holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and is professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.  Her research has examined social, political, and legal activism surrounding immigration issues, particularly immigration from El Salvador to the United States. Her first book, THE CULTURE OF PROTEST: RELIGIOUS ACTIVISM AND THE U.S. SANCTUARY MOVEMENT (Westview 1993) analyzed how congregations that declared themselves “sanctuaries” for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees constructed a means and a language of protesting U.S. refugee and foreign policy in the 1980s. Her second book, LEGALIZING MOVES: SALVADORAN IMMIGRANTS’ STRUGGLE FOR U.S. RESIDENCY (U. Michigan Press, 2000), studied how Salvadoran immigrants negotiated their legal identities in the United States in the 1990s, a period characterized by immigration reform in the U.S. and post-war reconstruction in El Salvador. Her third book, NATIONS OF EMIGRANTS: SHIFTING BOUNDARIES OF CITIZENSHIP IN EL SALVADOR AND THE UNITED STATES (Cornell University Press, 2007), considered how current forms of migration challenge conventional understandings of borders, citizenship, and migration itself. Her fourth book, EXILED HOME:  SALVADORAN TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH IN THE AFTERMATH OF VIOLENCE (Duke University Press, 2016) examined the experiences of 1.5 generation migrants, that is, individuals who were born in El Salvador but raised in the United States. Her fifth book DOCUMENTING IMPOSSIBLE REALITIES:  ETHNOGRAPHY, MEMORY AND THE AS IF“(Cornell University Press in 2023) coauthored with Barbara Yngvesson, explored the limitations of conventional accounts through which belonging is documented, focusing on the experiences of adoptees, deportees, migrants, and other exilic populations.  Her sixth book,  LEGAL PHANTOMS: EXECUTIVE RELIEF AND THE HAUNTING FAILURES OF U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY (Stanford 2024), co-authored with Sameer Ashar, Jennifer Chacon, and Stephen Lee, tells the story of forms of executive relief that never materialized, leading those who hoped to benefit from them to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by  unfulfilled promises. Her 7th book, ON THE RECORD: PAPERS, IMMIGRATION, AND LEGAL ADVOCACY (forthcoming from the University of California Press), recounts how the production, retrieval, and circulation of records and files figures in immigrants’ efforts to secure legal status in the United States. She is also co-editor of COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK (forthcoming, Routledge), with Lee Cabatingan and Deya Nevarez Martinez.

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