Stacey Vanderhurst
Areas of Interest:
I am interested in the politics of emigration and the practices of statecraft in Africa. My dissertation, Sheltered Lives: God, Sex, and Mobility in Nigeria’s Counter-Trafficking Programs, is an ethnography of a government-run residential center for migrant women identified as human trafficking victims in Lagos, Nigeria, based on from fieldwork supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner Gren Foundation. Motivated to leave by the same factors that make virtually all Nigerians eager to migrate, these women do not see themselves as victims and dispute their need for intervention, while Nigerian officials proudly describe the practice as preemptive. I argue that these programs instead aim to convince women that they were being trafficked and to discourage them from trying to migrate again—revealing novel modes of migration management and African governance in the process.
MA Thesis: "Image Is Everything": Transnational Governance and the Management of the Reputation of Nigeria.
Status: Post field
Previous Degrees: BA, University Notre Dame
Contact Information: Stacey_Vanderhurst@brown.edu
