My name is Elise Hjalmarson and I do global research with people on the move. In 2018, I began my PhD in Anthropology & Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, where I am an affiliate of its Global Migration Centre. I am the co-founder of migrant justice group Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture (RAMA) and an affiliate of the Swiss School of Latin American Studies.

Situated at the intersection of migration, gender, and Latin American studies, my dissertation considers the negotiation of competing desires, values, and aspirations by Latin American women living in Spain. As Research Assistant for the ERC-funded project ‘Returning to a Better Place: The (Re)assessment of the “Good Life” in Times of Crisis’, led by Dr. Valerio Simoni, I also explore the affective and moral dispositions engendered by the comparison of various sites along people’s migration trajectories.

The pursuit of migrant justice underlays all of my work to varying degrees. My broad research and teaching interests include migration and migrant labor, nationalism and borders, gender and feminist theory, racism and white supremacy, and contemporary Latin American politics and society. To date, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork among diverse Latin Americans in Spain and Jamaican migrant farmworkers in Canada.

Over the past five years, I have lived in Nicaragua, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, and Canada. I am fluent in both English and Spanish, and get by with my very rusty French. Despite my extensive traveling, I am still most at home on the Canadian West Coast and the unceded traditional territories of the Syilx people, also known as the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. In ‘normal’ times, I can be found writing at a café before the sun rises, the gym in the afternoons, and a dance studio at night. A close observer may catch me watching cat videos or googling house plants between writing spells, while I dream of putting down roots, warm light, and a world without borders.