Elise Hjalmarson
Elise is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Berkeley's Sociology Department and a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc.Mobility Fellow.
She received her PhD in Anthropology & Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2024. Her dissertation, titled "Cargando con Cuba: The Embodied Labor of Becoming Transnational Among Cuban Migrants in Spain", considered diasporic Cubans’ everyday negotiation of the closely bound material and moral obligations constitutive of cross-border economies of care. She holds a MA in Sociology and Political Studies and a BA in International Relations from the University of British Columbia.
The dismantling of borders and binaries underlays all her work to varying degrees. Her broad research and teaching interests include transnational labor migration, its governance, and worker agency, cross-border economies of care, and feminist methods and ethnography. To date, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Spain, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Canada.
Presently a co-convenor of AnthroMob and an editor with Allegra Laboratory, she is a former affiliate of the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Migration Centre and the Swiss School of Latin American Studies. Previously, she was seminar leader, academic coordinator, and lecturer of Latin American Studies with Kulturstudier at the Universidad National Autónoma de Nicaragua. In 2013, she co-founded RAMA, a migrant justice group that supports agricultural and undocumented workers on the unceded Syilx territories of the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada.
Peer-reviewed articles
2025. “‘As if the Soul Returns to the Body’: The Affective Dimensions of Stuckedness, Choice, and Returning ‘Voluntarily’ to Nicaragua from Spain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1-17.
2024. “Comparative Moves: The Pursuit of Value and Belonging in Transnational Migration toward a ‘Better Life’." Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1-21. (Valerio Simoni, Jérémie Voirol, and Elise Hjalmarson)
2024. “Borders, Labor, and Beyond: Collective Reflections on Harsha Walia’s Writing, Activism, and Influence on the Anthropology of Work.” Anthropology of Work Review, 35(1): 39-54. (Campbell, Stephen, Gerardo Rodrigues Solis, Arjan Shankar, Seth Holmes, Elise Hjalmarson, Saida Hodzic, Natasha Raheja, and Adrian Goldbolt)
2022. “Sentenced for the Season: Jamaican Migrant Farmworkers on Okanagan Orchards.” Race & Class, 63(4): 81-100.
2019. “Border Imperialism, Racial Capitalism, and Geographies of Deracination.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(1): 107-129. (Levi Gahman and Elise Hjalmarson)
2018. “Quiet Struggles: Migrant Farmworkers, Informal Labor, and Everyday Resistance in Canada.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 61(2-3): 141-158. (Amy Cohen and Elise Hjalmarson)
Recent public scholarship
2020. Canada’s Emergency Response Benefit Does Nothing for Migrant Workers. The Conversation.
2017. Temporary Migrant Farmworkers in BC. British Columbia Organic Grower: Journal for the Certified Organic Associations of BC. (Robyn Bunn, Elise Hjalmarson, and Christine Mettler)
2014. International Migrants Day: Canada’s Exclusionary Immigration Practices Have Got to Go! Rabble.ca. (Amy Cohen and Elise Hjalmarson)