I am a cultural anthropologist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. I am an UDLAP alum, and I obtained my PhD from the University of Oregon in 2016. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). I am also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School (2022-2023) where I will be working on my project “Dead Letter”: Animal Law, Activism, and Mexican Politics,” which is part of my new research on the animal rights movement in urban Mexico.

My research interests can be divided into two overlapping sub-fields. The first sub-field includes the anthropology of migration, particularly the analysis of internal and transnational migrations, gender (masculinity and femininity), indigeneity, kinship, and care. The second sub-field includes multi-species ethnography, legal anthropology, linguistic anthropology, digital anthropology, and the anthropology of social movements, particularly through the study of activism and animal rights in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.

My book, titled “Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration” (University of Texas Press 2022), is based on my dissertation that focuses on how masculinity and femininity shape, and are shaped by, internal and transnational migrations.

I also co-edited a book with Dr. Jennifer Byrnes titled “The Marginalized in Death: A Forensic Anthropology of Intersectional Identity in the Modern Era.”  Lexington Books. (2022), that “bridges the gap between forensic and cultural anthropology in how both disciplines describe and theorize the dead, highlighting the potential for interdisciplinary scholarship.”

I am also working on a new project that examines the emergent animal rights movement in urban Mexico in the midst of continuous violence and ongoing challenges to the Mexican legal system–I am currently conducting research in Ciudad Juárez, México. This research has been generously funded by UCLA Law and the Culture and Animals Foundation.

You can read more about my research projects here: Research.

Email: ivan.sandoval-cervantes@unlv.edu

Academia.edu: https://unlv.academia.edu/IvanSandovalCervantes

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/IvanAntropologo