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Heath Cabot Home  Directory Heath Cabot
| Education History | |
B.A. Religion, Humanities
University of Chicago
M.A. Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Research Focus | |
Areas of interest and expertise: migration; asylum; rights regimes; law and legal anthropology; humanitarianism; nation and citizenship; NGO’s; language and translation; narrative; urban memory; Greece, the Mediterranean, Europe.
My dissertation, Translating Law and Lives: Asylum and Legal Aid in Athens, examines dilemmas of political belonging, legal classification, and humanitarianism at an NGO that provides legal counsel to asylum seekers in Greece, one of the most contested border areas of the EU. I explore how NGO clients, interpreters, and lawyers build asylum cases through the telling and translating of life histories in diverse contexts, and how informal innovations in asylum cases do and do not translate into formal law.
I have recently begun a new project, tentatively entitled The Lacunic City: Athens, Migration, and the New Nation, on emerging forms of urban identity and memory in Athens in the wake of recent mass immigration. I am also developing a long-term ethnographic project that explores the interrelationships between rapidly changing, and extraordinarily fraught, Greek attitudes toward the state, the family, and “nature” (fisi) as agents of care and social support.
I am interested in initiating conversations, across disciplinary and geo-political borders, about common problems facing affected communities, practitioners, and policy makers in the domains of labor and asylum related migration. |
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