Nick Rodrigo

Student Fellow

Nick Rodrigo is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY where he is currently writing his PhD thesis titled “Wielding The Border: A genealogy of US-Mexico borderland practices and the purposes they serve from conquest to today”.  Through the construction of a robust theoretical lens, archival research and qualitative investigation in the US borderlands he will trace how the practices of bordering have evolved, and the central purpose they serve to the US racial capitalism and the expansion of the security state.

Nick is a founding member of the Social Anatomy of Deportation Regime at John Jay college, where he has coordinated their public events and research projects since its establishment in 2018. He has written several op-eds and book chapters on the state of US-Mexico borderland violence and the nature of detention and deportation proceedings in the US, as well as producing a podcast on the deportation regime in the US called “They Are Just Deportees.”

Participating Years

2022–2023

Revolutionary Arts

Wary of making politics an aesthetic in disguise, radical theory and practice have nevertheless embraced all kinds of artistic provocations and traditions in every form and genre. At the same time, the possibility for fundamental change demands a range of interpretive encounters that might elicit meanings for people whom Julius Scott, writing about a different time, described as “disenchanted people casting about for new options.”