Leandra Barrett '15 Presenting at Harvard Undergraduate Research Conference

Leandra Pilar Barrett, a senior major in Latino Studies, will be presenting her senior honors thesis research at Harvard College on April 11, 2015 during the Diversity, (In)equity, and Social Justice Undergraduate Research Conference. Her project Pedir Posada: (infra)structural violence, gender, and asylum in south Texas was selected for the conference program as a research paper presentation at the conference and she will be eligible for prizes issued at the conference.

Barrett’s presentation will mark the culmination of independent research conducted over the past year under the supervision of Professor Richard Wright. Leandra’s thesis compares the legal and social resources available to detained versus non-detained asylum seekers from East Africa, Central America, and Cuba using ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a faith-based homeless shelter for migrants in the Rio Grande Valley. She observed that while all migrants who express reasonable fear of prosecution are granted asylum proceedings, the day-to-day experience that characterizes the time between a reasonable fear interview and immigration court proceedings varies greatly for different asylum seekers.  

The research would not have been possible without the generous support Dartmouth’s Undergraduate Advising & Research, the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.