Cite as: Hakim, Gina. 2019. Research Program Description. University of California. November. http://centerforethnography.org/content/gina-hakim-research-program
My research centers on how migrants make and think of home, and how this shapes the lives of individuals in their home communities. I n particular, I study the forms of expertise that are involving in caring for animals and land as ways that migrants participate in their...Read more
This is the community of Urequío in the highlands of Michoacán, Mexico. I do research in rural communities like Urequío that are responding to ecological and infrastructural challenges in partnership with migrants living in the U.S.
This image is a play on surrealist painter René Magritte's 1929 La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images). The painting is of a smoking pipe with the words, ceci n'est pas une pipe (this is not a pipe) written below. Magritte wrote of the image: "The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying!"
For me, this image is an invocation to the study of infrastructure, both in the materiality of the built environment and in terms of emotion, expertise, and memory.