Dr. Allison Stuewe

I am a cultural anthropologist with a focus on legal anthropology. As a scholar, I have been motivated by one major question: how do a history of violence and government legal bureaucracy shape intimate relationships? Across research projects in Arizona, Nebraska, and Germany, I have explored both the meaningful and material dimensions of refugee and migrant life. I use historical political economy as a framework for analyzing the transnational processes that displace people and make them vulnerable in their new circumstances. In my ethnographic research, I center the adjustments and compromises that people—particularly those in their twenties and thirties—make in response to the impossible demands of diaspora life. I focus on kinship, family planning, religious and cultural education, and marriage decisions as sites where the political and economic tensions of migration, ethnonationalism, and gendered labor visibly chafe.

In addition to migration policy, kinship, and historical political economy, my research interests include German history, European border regimes, religious and ethnic minorities of Iraq, Marxist feminism, and Indigenous Studies. My current research project explores the marriage decisions of young Iraqi Yezidi refugees living in Germany.