UNM community celebrates 2024 CERL awardee, Kimberly Gauderman

For 14 years, University of New Mexico Associate Professor Kimberly Gauderman has fought for those facing gender-, sexuality-, and racial-based violence in their home countries who seek asylum in the U.S. Next week, she will address a crowd of UNM students, faculty, staff, alumni, and her family and fellow peers as the 2024 Community Engaged Research Lecture (CERL) recipient.

"Community engaged research is a core element to UNM's scholarly enterprise and Dr. Gauderman's work exemplifies what it means to be truly engaged in a community," said Ellen Fisher, UNM vice president for research. "Moreover, standing with and serving as an expert witness for some of the most vulnerable populations in the world demonstrates an enormous commitment to safety and justice for all people."

Gauderman is an associate professor of Latin American History. She has served as an expert witness in more than 300 Latin American asylum cases since 2010, focusing on gender-, sexuality-, and racial-based violence in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, Ecuador, and Peru.

"In the poem Home, Warsan Shire writes that 'No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.' As an expert witness, I hunt that shark," Gauderman said. "My research into the cruelty and injustice that asylum-seekers have faced, and the testimony I provide to an often-skeptical immigration judge, allow our courts to provide safety from the certain violence of their home countries."

Having brought asylum experts, attorneys, and community leaders together during a national conference at UNM, in 2019, Gauderman was awarded the Scholars & Society Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation.

"The need to increase the number of expert witnesses and the value of a volume that would mobilize academics in this service was confirmed in the conference. During this conference I developed enduring relationships with participants, some of whom are contributors to the volume Practicing Asylum," she said.

Seeking asylum is internationally recognized as a human right and has been protected under U.S. Law since 1980. For individuals fleeing persecution in their home countries, accessing and navigating the U.S. asylum system - which has long been a challenging, lengthy, and often unfruitful process - is becoming increasingly difficult.

Gauderman says her lecture will draw on her work as an expert witness involving Latin American asylum seekers who are fleeing gender- and sexuality-based violence to offer reflections on the root causes of migration, the complexity of the asylum system, and the role of scholarly expertise in asylum cases.

Gauderman became a Lobo in 1998; she served as the Departmental Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of History for nine years and as director of the UNM Latin American Studies Program for three years from 2005-2008. She teaches a variety of courses focusing on early and modern Latin American history. Reflective of her research interests and her concern for social justice and human rights, she focuses on the construction of institutional authority in the early modern and modern periods in Iberia and Latin America and the creation of racial categories, gender norms, and sexual identities. Drawing on her community-engaged scholarship on U.S. asylum, she has developed courses and advisement that supports interdisciplinary work on immigration and women's, Indigenous, Afro-Latinos, and LGBTQ+ peoples' rights in contemporary Latin America.

Gauderman is also the primary author and editor of Practicing Asylum: A Handbook for Expert Witnesses in Latin American Gender- and Sexuality-Based Asylum Cases.

"Because of the growing restrictions on asylum, the work of expert witnesses is increasingly critical, but there are insufficient numbers of experts to assist in these cases," she said. "Practicing Asylum provides a historical framework, conceptual tools, and templates adaptable to the ever-changing context of U.S. immigration law and policy to encourage and guide other academics to engage in expert witnessing, including how to recognize the secondary trauma that this work may provoke and to care for themselves in this grueling service."

The lecture will take place in George Pearl Hall, Thursday, Sept. 14 at 4:30 p.m.

The UNM Community Engaged Research Lecture (CERL)
The Annual Community-Engaged Scholarship Lecture Award recognizes exceptional scholarly work that embodies UNM's commitment to community engagement and profoundly and systematically affects the relationship between the university and the larger community in a positive and meaningful way. This is the highest award for community-engaged scholarship bestowed by the University of New Mexico. The nominee must be an active, full Professor or exceptional Associate Professor at the time of the nomination is submitted. The scholarship or the creative work of the nominee must be of the highest quality and should be tied to the faculty member's expertise.

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