About

Briana Nichols is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University.  She received her PhD in 2022 from the Graduate School of Education and the department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her doctoral studies, Briana earned a B.A. in Anthropology and a Masters of Teaching, both from the University of Chicago. As a dual language middle school teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, Briana witnessed her students grappling with disjunctures between the dominant narrative focusing on trauma and suffering pre-migration, and their actual lived experiences in their countries of origin. This tension inspires her inquiries into the larger implications of erasure in migration discourse.

Departing from scholarship that focuses on future-making in terms of youth mobility, her work centers on youth who fight to remain in their communities. Briana examines the intersection between transnational development, international migration, and indigenous youth educational striving in Guatemala, and explores the everyday practices of young people as they attempt to create futures of non-migration.

Briana’s research focuses broadly on how living in the wake of transnational migration informs new political, economic and social formations.  She has written on immigration, development, coloniality and community change in both Guatemalan and U.S. contexts, examining how human (im)mobility articulates with educational systems as well as gendered and racial epistemologies.  Her research can be found in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnologies, Language & Communication and VOLUTNAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. She has also written for the Center For Migration Studies New York, Anthropology News and Youth Circulations. She is a recipient of a NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, Dean’s Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania and a Global Scholars Early Career Fellowship from the University of California, Irvine.