As a cultural anthropologist, my research agenda is informed by three concerns: migration, gender and labor. While these topics may be pursued across disciplines, anthropologists’ ethnographic methods enable me to analyze their local contexts as they connect to larger forces of change. Because my research illuminates such urgent human rights concerns as trafficking into forced labor, women’s poverty, and migrant labor exploitation, I see my research as part of what has been called “public anthropology.”

My specific research and policy concerns emerge from my commitment to use anthropology to better understand how poor women and men craft long-term labor strategies to move their families out of poverty, exploring, in particular, international migration as a labor strategy. This research agenda has produced two book-length projects. The first, "What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic" (Duke University Press 2004), is based on field research in the Dominican Republic. It focuses on poor women’s use of the sex industry in the Dominican Republic as a stepping-stone to international migration through marriage to foreign clients. It lays bare the connection between large structural forces in the globalized economy and their effects on individuals in a sex-tourist destination – particularly as they face hierarchies based on race, gender and citizenship.

My research trajectory has expanded into a broader inquiry of trafficking and exploitation of migrant labor in the United States and how migrants struggle to maintain control over their work lives. My second book, "Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States" (Duke University Press: forthcoming 2013) builds on my activities as both a researcher and an activist on issues related to low-wage work and migration in the global economy. In the late 1990’s, I participated in what was called the “Trafficking Working Group.” Participants included human rights lawyers, women’s advocates, migrants’ rights advocates, and social workers at refugee resettlement agencies. The working group helped form the “Freedom Network,” an umbrella organization whose members include social-service agencies and migrant rights’ organizations that assist in the resettlement of trafficked persons. These organizations were confronting an immediate task of assisting trafficked persons resettle in the United States, under newly enacted legislation designed to protect individuals found in situations of severe exploitation. Social-service agencies had no experience resettling trafficked persons. They looked like refugees; but not quite. It was a new group with its own challenges.

Through my involvement with this group, I was able to meet and interview formerly trafficked persons about their experiences of resettlement. These interviews reveal that life after trafficking is a series of mundane everyday struggles -- usually not the stuff of press conferences or headline-grabbing news. This contrasts with media accounts of trafficking which tend to dwell on the spectacular – the horrors of life in trafficking and dramatic stories of escapes or rescues. Formerly trafficked persons’ concerns about work, housing, or schooling resemble those of other migrants.

This connection between formerly trafficked persons’ and other migrants’ experiences with resettlement – particularly with labor issues – helped shape my current book project: "Shattered Families: Detention, Deportation and the Assault on Immigrants in the United States." This new project focuses on how families navigate life in the United States when loved ones are detained, in deportation proceedings, or deported. By talking with individuals about their day-to-day struggles living separated from family members, I hope to call attention to the profound toll the current deportation regime imposes on families and their communities.