ABOUT ME

¡Saludos! Greetings!

I'm Dr. Gwendolyn Ferreti (she, hers, ella). A proud mexicana raised between la pequeña Habana (Miami, Florida) and la Ciudad de México (Mexico City), I am a first generation college student, professora, Spanish, English and Spanglish code switcher, second generation immigrant, and engaged teacher-scholar. My life experiences and intersecting positionalities inform my research, methodology, pedagogy, and praxis.

I am Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies housed under the Department of Peace and Social Justice Studies at Berea College. I am a social anthropologist/ethnographer who specializes in Latina/o/x and Critical Migration Studies. I earned my B.A. in Art History and Sociology/Anthropology at Florida International University with a brief stint at the Universidad Iberoamericana in DF, México as an international student. After finishing my undergraduate studies, I moved on to earn my M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin with a Graduate Portfolio in Mexican American Studies from the Center for Mexican American Studies. As a graduate student, I won a Ford Foundation predoctoral fellowship and a dissertation writing fellowship by the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin. I then and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in at the Institute for Rural Health Research at the University of Alabama. Prior to teaching to Berea College, I was a Lecturer in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Spelman College. My teaching draws from my research and advocacy work.

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My research explores immigration enforcement, xenophobic racism, Latina/o/x community formation and resistance in the US South. Specifically, I study the multi-scalar mechanisms used by the State to control migration and migrant life and examine protest and resistance to these mechanisms. As such, my work explores the evolution of immigrant restrictionism in the region and the growth of a southern immigrant justice movement. In addition to my primary research, I have collaborated to examine how multi-level factors impact Latina adolescent sexual health and healthcare access in the South in an applied research study during my postdoc. I am an engaged/activist scholar, and my long-time organizing and public scholarship has been recognized by several community organizations.

In addition to my roles as faculty, I co-founded and coordinate the Gender, Race, Immigration, Dis/ability and Sexualities Research Working group at Berea College, supported through funding by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. I also serve as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) Student-Support Coordinator and coordinate the Latino Male Initiative--an externally-funded program that employs curricular and and co-curricular strategies to encourage Latino student persistence.