Dr. Ieva Jusionyte is a legal and medical anthropologist who studies law and violence in contemporary states, with particular interests in borders, materiality of injury, and ethnographic storytelling.
Dr. Jusionyte’s scholarship explores the conceptual and material relationship between the state and various forms of violence. She uses ethnography as a method and a form of storytelling to examine the narratives, aesthetics, and practices that underlie state security. Based on fieldwork with Argentine news journalists and with Mexican and American emergency responders, her first two books examined the power asymmetries that underlie the legal and political construction of threats and the manifold social effects these discourses, policies, and practices have in communities where they are applied. While the first one, Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border (University of California Press 2015) focused on the production of knowledge about crime and representation of security as a process that is scalar and contested, in which journalists play a role in defining the meanings of both crime and security, the attention in the second book, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border (University of California Press, 2018), shifted to the materiality of security, particularly the importance of terrain, both the built environment and natural topography, in facilitating social and physical injury as two braided modalities of state violence. Both books approached state violence through the ethnographic and analytic focus on work – that of journalists and that of emergency responders – and the ethical, political and legal dilemmas that workers grapple with because of their professional mandates. Her latest book, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (University of California Press 2024), follows firearms that circulate in the binational space between the United States and Mexico, both as policy objects and cultural artifacts. It is as much a cultural history of guns in two neighboring countries that share the legacies of colonialism and frontier violence, as an analysis of the politics and economics that perpetuate the vicious circle of violence on the U.S.-Mexico border.
