In this episode you’ll hear from Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor of international security and anthropology at the Watson Institute. In addition to teaching and research, she also has a side job – as a licensed EMT.
In May 2015 she combined these two passions. She moved to Nogales, AZ, to study emergency responders on the US-Mexico border. For two years she studied life along this border, and worked on it as an EMT herself.
What she found became the subject of her book, ‘Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border.’ In it, she explores how the US-Mexico border – as a legal boundary, an idea, and a physical space – changes emergency response, and what these changes reveal about how borders affect people who live near them.