Barbara Sostaita

Barbara Sostaita received her PhD in Religious Studies from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021. She is currently working on a manuscript based on her dissertation, an (auto)ethnographic experiment titled "Sanctuary Everywhere: Fugitive Care on the Migrant Trail." Focused on the Sonora-Arizona borderlands, Barbara documents moments of care and intimacy that expose the impermanence and instability of border militarization. Her collaborators include artists memorializing the migrant dead, deported nurses healing wounds in Nogales, Sonora, migrants defying prohibitions on touch in detention centers, and humanitarian workers leading “water drops” along remote desert trails. A (formerly undocumented) immigrant, Barbara became a United States citizen the summer she began dissertation fieldwork. In the spirit of nepantlera Gloria Anzaldúa, her dissertation combines personal narrative, ethnographic fieldwork, and borderlands poetry—an approach known as autohistoria-teoria. Her project is funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) and the American Association of University Women.