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Pablo Seward Delaporte, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Anthropology


Education

Ph.D. in Anthropology, Stanford University
M.A. in Anthropology, Stanford University
B.A. in Anthropology and Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests

A critical medical and psychological anthropologist, my research interests lie in migration, race, and ethnicity; urban precarity and vulnerability; experience, subjectivity, and phenomenology; violence, risk, and care; theories on space and place; feminism; and decoloniality in Latin America. Drawing from ethnography, archival research, and community-based methods, I integrate anthropological, decolonial, and feminist theories of racialization and embodiment with ecological approaches to health, inequality, and care. My current book project, Precarious Becomings: The Politics of Migrant Life in Chile, explores how migrant women in Chile’s northern border city of Antofagasta make uninhabitable spaces livable and how, in this process, their lives become entangled with dangerous environments. I argue that the “ecologies of care” that result from this spatial transformation are in tension with state projects that allegedly protect “vulnerable” migrant populations by demolishing environments where poverty, crime, and risk take place.

Professional Web Site: www.pablosewarddelaporte.com

Publications and Media Placements

Forthcoming. “‘Life Started Hitting Her Like This, This, This’: Vulnerability, Relationality, and the Making of Hard Corporeal Selves.” Ethos.

2023. “La primera ciudad latinoamericana: Heroísmo en las luchas descoloniales de mujeres migrantes en Chile” [“The First Latin American City: Heroism in the Decolonial Struggles of Migrant Women in Chile.”] In Las fracturas del mármol: Heroicidades a contrapelo. Mónica González García, Sarah Moody, and Astrid Santana Fernández de Castro, eds. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: CLACSO; La Habana: Editorial UH.

2023. “La ciudadanía desde el campamento migrante: neoliberalismo, racialización e indigenidad en Antofagasta, Chile” [“Citizenship from the Migrant Campamento: Neoliberalism, Racialization, and Indigeneity in Antofagasta, Chile.”] In Ciudadanías: Coexistencia y diferencia en Chile actual. Helene Risør, Marjorie Murray, and Tamara Hernández, eds. Santiago, Chile: Pehuén Editores.  

2022. “Navigating Apathy and Attacks in the Struggle for Migrant Rights in Chile.” In Chilean Politics Today. Romina Akemi and Joshua Frens-String, eds. Special Issue, NACLA Report on the Americas.

2022. “Rethinking Asylum: King Center Fellowship Recipient Pablo Seward Delaporte Studies the Tension Between Migrants in Northern Chile and the Government’s Plans to Resettle Them.” Interview by Rebecca Bayer, King Center on Global Development, Center News.

2020. “Staying with the Rubble: Chile at a Crossroads.” Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology. 

2017. “‘We Will Revive’: Addiction, Spiritual Warfare, and Recovery in Latin America’s Cocaine Production Zone.” In Drugs, Politics, and Society in the Global South. Maziyar Ghiabi, ed. Special Issue, Third World Quarterly 39, no. 1: 1–16.

Honors and Awards

  • Postdoctoral Research Associate Fellowship, Brown University, Population Studies and Training Center (2023)
  • Society for Psychological Anthropology Condon Prize for Best Student Essay (2023)
  • Stanford University, Centennial Teaching Assistant Award (2021)
  • Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2018)
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2016)