In partnership with Verso Books, and on the occasion of the launch of Reece Jones’s Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, the LA Forum presents a conversation about the history of the U.S./Mexico border and the militarization of border walls around the world. Reece Jones, an expert on international border security projects and a geographer at the University of Hawaii, will discuss his book with architect and Woodbury University professor Rene Peralta.
Saturday, October 15, 2016 at 4pm
Location:
Arcana: Books on the Arts
8675 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232Pricing / RSVP:
Free. RSVP here.
Jones’s Violent Borders breaks down the contradictions of living in a globalized world that limits the free movement of people.
The U.S./Mexico border, a major focus of Violent Borders, is a perfect example of the global hardening of borders. Over the past thirty years, many borders have been transformed into militarized security spaces through increased funding, deployments of additional border guards, and construction of walls and surveillance infrastructure. While two thirds of the border with Mexico remains unfenced, federal fences are products of the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to build a wall on the remaining section of the border has been a major specter of the presidential election. Jones makes the case that borders are not the answer to our problems, and ends on a simple, yet important, idea: borders need not be a natural part of the human world.
Reece Jones is a Professor of Geography at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and the author of Border Walls, published by Zed Books in 2013. Jones is an award-winning scholar and is often called on to comment on border crises by publications such as the New York Times. His work has also been featured in Time Magazine, the Economist and Vice
Rene Peralta is the co-founder of the Tijuana architectural firm Generica and the Director of the Architecture, Landscape + Urbanism program at the Woodbury University School of Architecture in San Diego. His recent work has been directed toward the research of social and cultural forms of urban border between the cities of Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California.