Ulla D. Dalum Berg

Migrant shelters across the Americas serve as crucial waypoints offering temporary refuge, safety, food, and essential services, but they are also deeply shaped by humanitarian and political agendas and entanglements with global capital. Organized around the concepts of “shelter” and “sheltering,” the proposed workshop is organized by Ulla D. Berg (Rutgers) and Ana Ramos-Zayas (Yale) and gathers international scholars from institutions in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and the U.S. to anthropologically theorize and empirically analyze shelter as idea, place, process, and practice of un/making and un/building. While anthropology recognizes shelters’ dual care/control functions and liminal nature, we propose a different framework linking sheltering to broader debates on infrastructure, sustainability, technology, and capital accumulation. Asking “who shelters?” and “who is sheltered?” across geopolitical contexts, we examine whose lives are stabilized and whose are suspended, or what Achille Mbembe calls the “politics of who gets to inhabit the world.” To meet these goals, we propose a week-long workshop in Mexico City in October 2026 that includes three main components: 1) a closed manuscript workshop to prepare a dossier for a peer reviewed journal (in English) and an anthology (in Spanish), 2) a hybrid public event, and 3) an interactive digital humanities workshop where participants will curate and produce a polyphonic and interactive map on shelters and sheltering in the Americas.