Update (5/21/21): Jackson also received the Agnes Archer Warren Award, given annually by the Philosophy Department. The award, established in honor of the wife of Dr. W. Preston Warren, professor of philosophy, emeritus, consists of selected books awarded to a student in the College of Arts and Sciences for a written work demonstrating well-informed use of a range of sources in several disciplines.
Congratulations to Philosophy and Political Science double-major Jackson Ingram, who recently (successfully!) defended his honors thesis “Immigration Enforcement and Electronic Monitoring: Reification Within a Racialized State Apparatus”. This culminates four years of interdisciplinary research with his Presidential Fellows Mentor Vanessa Massaro from Geography and work in Philosophy (stemming in particular from Adam Burgos’s Philosophy and Race course). Here is the abstract of his thesis and a photo from the defense:
The enforcement of immigration policy in the United States has become an increasingly important issue over the past several decades. Predominant methods of enforcement have been criticized as costly, inhumane, and inefficient. The use of electronic monitoring devices, commonly known as ankle monitors (or similar technology) has been proposed as a means of alleviating the problems of physical detention without sacrificing border security. However, given the harmful convergence of discourses of racialization, criminality, and immigration, I argue that we must critically examine the subtle ways in which the use of electronic monitoring devices may contribute to unethical enforcement practices. Particularly, I caution that affixing an electronic monitoring device — a physical representation of otherness and criminality — to the (likely non-white) bodies of immigrants, contributes to the propagation of racist, xenophobic, and nativist fearmongering. I, with the support of the Bucknell Survey Center, conducted a survey of a representative sample of 1200 respondents in order to support this claim. The survey gauged respondents’ views on electronic monitoring and immigration, and provided results which empiricize my analysis of the condition of immigration enforcement in the United States and the consequences for dignity of the proliferation of electronic monitoring.
