Presentations and discussion featuring Alexandra Délano Alonso (Assistant Professor of Global Studies, Co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, The New School for Social Research), Eric Foner (DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University), Alyshia Gálvez (Associate Professor of Latin American, Latino and Puerto Rican Studies, Director of the Jaime Lucero Mexican Studies Institute at CUNY, Lehman College, City University of New York), Elora Mukherjee, Associate Clinical Professor of Law; Director, Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, Columbia Law School), JC Salyer (Term Assistant Professor of Practice, Department of Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University; Staff Attorney, Arab-American Family Support Center).

In the weeks since the election, calls for sanctuary campuses have become central to the preemptive organizing to protect the rights of undocumented people and other vulnerable populations now at intensified risk. What does sanctuary mean in the contemporary United States? An idea with antecedents in medieval religious practice, a sanctuary, was most recently recuperated in the movement to protect Central American refugees in the 1980s and the contemporary idea of sanctuary cities. This interdisciplinary panel explores sanctuary’s legal, political, social, and historical connotations as well as its strategic uses. What could the designation of sanctuary spaces on university campuses mean for strategies of mobilization and resistance now and in the future?