Stanford Humanities Center
Lynn Stephen is Philip H. Knight Chair and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon and a graduate faculty member in Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. Her research focuses on migration, mobilities, and asylum; gendered violence; race; transborder communities; and Latinx communities and Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples in Mexico, Guatemala, California, and the Northwest. She emphasizes Indigenous epistemologies and public accessibility through films, websites, and scholarly publications.
SHC Project
Invisible No More! Transborder Mesoamerican Indigenous Territories, Languages, and Communities in Diaspora
Invisible No More! explores how the concept of transborder territory encompasses Indigenous histories, journeys, settlements, and displacements while acknowledging colonial boundaries, nation-state formation, enslavement, and racial systems in Latin America and the U.S. The book documents how Mesoamerican Indigenous communities in diaspora sustain transborder territories across Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S., framing these territories within settler colonial politics and explaining their reconstitution through ethnographic and testimonial accounts of Indigenous language use, community networks, and shared practices centered on care and connection. Accompanying a digital humanities project, the book brings questions of cultural, linguistic, and social justice to the fore and makes visible the diverse traditions, knowledge, histories, and community-building of Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples in diaspora.
Books
Seeking Justice for Gendered Violence: Courts, Communities, and Care in Guatemala
Co-authored with Erin Beck. Forthcoming, Duke University Press.
Stories that Make History: Remembering Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas. Duke University Press, 2021. Available open access at: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/51883.
Indigenous Women and Violence: Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice, edited by Lynn Stephen and Shannon Speed. University of Arizona Press, 2021.
We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013.
Articles 2018-present
The Limits and Possibilities of Asylum: Lessons from Expert Witnessing and Working at a Shelter.
Latin American Perspectives 52(2): 200-218, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X251319297
Violence Against Women and Girls, Discrimination, and Women’s Responses. Latin American Research Review 59(1):196-208, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2023.62
Introduction: Mesoamerican Indigenous Mobilities and Diasporas in Mexico and the United States. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 39 (1) 7-31, Winter 2023, Co-authored with Laura Velasco Ortiz. https://www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/62657-mexican-studies-estudios-mexicanos-publishes-special-issue-on-mesoamerican-indigenous-mobilities-in-mexico-and-the-united-states
Vulnerabilities and Collective Care: Indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican Farmworkers in Diaspora Confronting COVID-19 in the Western U.S. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 39(1) 117-144, Winter 2023.
Defying Settler Colonial Logics: Transborder Territories and Indigenous Mam Women Seeking Justice for Gendered Violence. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (LACES), 2022. DOI:10.1080/17442222.2022.2152266
Settler colonialism in Latin American and Native Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (LACES), 2022, DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2022.2113308
Using Theory and Ethnography for Asylum Seekers Fleeing Gendered Violence. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 46(1) 67-71, 2022. DOI: doi.org/10.1111/napa.12183
From Legislation to Everyday Practices in Guatemala’s Violence Against Women Courts. Journal of Latin American Studies 53 (4): 741-766, 2021. Co-authored with Erin Beck. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X21000511
Fleeing rural violence: Mam women seeking gendered justice in Guatemala and the U.S. The Journal of Peasant Studies 46(2):229-257, 2019. DOI: doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2018.1534836
Gendered Violence and Indigenous Mexican Asylum Seekers: Expert Witnessing as Ethnographic Engagement. Anthropological Quarterly 91(1): 321-358, Winter, 2018. 10.1353/anq.2018.0010
