Lives in Transit

"Vogt guides us through deeply inspiring and profoundly disturbing transit zones. Her exceptional research invites us to witness the bodily and emotional trauma experienced by migrants and the care and intimacy enacted by unlikely characters in unexpected places. Her powerful writing introduces us to migrants, shelter volunteers, human smugglers, and kidnappers embroiled in webs of violence and profit spun within hierarchies of gender and ethnicity. Her analysis helps us appreciate contradictions of violence, security, and humanitarian projects. This book leaves us heartened and haunted in a world increasingly touched by immigration and displacement."—Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

"Lives in Transit is widely significant and far-reaching, yet also intimate and deeply humanizing. Students and scholars of migration will value Vogt's attention to socioeconomic relationships produced in spaces of clandestine migration, as well as her keen analyses of the ways in which gendered violence is perpetrated by actors across a spectrum of empowerment. Readers will also appreciate the book's powerful stories and engaging writing."—Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, author of Becoming Legal

"By presenting an ethnography focused on movement itself, Vogt engages with but also extends scholarship on migration, transnationalism, and borders. This contributes to understandings of violence, in/security, and the risks of border crossings, while making a compelling argument about how violent spaces can also be spaces of possibility, connection, intimacy, and opportunity."—Deborah A. Boehm, professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies/Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno