Welcome to Issue 3: A Note from the Editor-in-Chief of Semi-Structured
Thurka Sangaramoorthy is the Editor-in-Chief of Semi-Structured and the Founder and Director the Public Ethnography Lab. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist and global health researcher with expertise in community-engaged ethnographic research, including rapid assessments, among vulnerable populations in the United States, Africa, and Latin America/Caribbean. She conducts research in the areas of global health and migration, HIV/STD, and environmental health policy. Dr. Sangaramoorthy is the author of numerous publications including three books. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at American University.
Elise Ferrer is the Managing Editor of Semi-Structured and the Lab Manager of the Public Ethnography Lab. She completed her MA in Public Anthropology at American University in 2024 and joined PEL immediately thereafter. She also serves as the Conference Manager for the annual Public Anthropology Conference. Her scholarly work explores race, labor, space, and historiography, grounded in a commitment to producing politically accountable research legible within and beyond anthropology. She has published in American Anthropologist, Social Science & Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health.
Immigration court is, by law, open to the public. No ID required. No advance notice. But sitting in on a case in Aurora, or Charlotte, or Santa Ana, most of these students found the same thing: the door was open and they still couldn't follow what was happening. A missing interpreter. A docket nobody explained. A hearing that lasted six minutes after a four-hour wait, with no one in the room to say why.
In this special issue, “On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court,” we’re honored to present an ambitious collection of 22 student pieces which together offer an embodied, emotional, and analytically rich account of immigration courts across the country in this contemporary moment. As part of immigration-based projects under the direction of scholar-activists Lauren Heidbrink, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Rebecca Galemba (who developed, curated, and edited this issue), students logged hundreds of hours in immigration courtrooms across the country, gaining both critical training in ethnographic practice and a crash course in immigration law. The issue offers a space where students’ insights can move beyond the courtroom and the classroom and into the wider public, for whom these insights are critical. Best said by the issue’s editors in their framing piece:
“[The students’] essays, poetry, art, and performances build a record of what happens in immigration court even—and perhaps especially—when those reflections are raw, partial, or messy and when the incoherences of court come through in the telling. At a moment when many legal and social institutions are under strain or active dismantling, courtwatching helps prepare students to move beyond critique toward imagining and building what should come next.”
None of the 22 contributors — from Columbia, Princeton, Barnard, the University of Denver, UC Berkeley, the University of Oregon, and California State University, Long Beach — were given a shared prompt. They picked their own courtrooms, in cities from Miami to Portland to New York, and wrote up what they saw on their own terms. That they kept landing on the same problem, without coordinating, says more than any single essay could.
For a number of contributors, that problem got personal fast. Students describe being mistaken for a respondent's relative, pulled in to translate, or recognizing their own family's story in the case unfolding in front of them. A few weren't just observing the room — they were being watched back, treated as one more thing to account for in the docket.
That's part of why the collection doesn't stay in prose. There's a drawing of chains from a student who heard them before she saw anything: an officer carrying handcuffs toward a side door, before she'd even reached the courtroom. There's a pair of monologues, staged at a deli counter and a flower stand, because the waiting itself didn't survive translation into a straightforward account. A few contributors say as much directly in their artist statements: no metaphor, no simulation — just the only form that held what they saw.
Semi-Structured exists to put ethnography in front of readers who may not open an academic journal. Most of what we publish comes from people who've already spent years learning the method. This issue is different. It catches students while they're still learning it, in real time, watching them figure out that where you sit in a room changes what you're able to see, and that writing any of it down is itself a kind of responsibility. That's the collection we wanted for this issue.
It opens with a framing piece from Lauren Heidbrink, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Rebecca Galemba, who built the courtwatching programs that made this work possible. What follows are the students who did the watching.
Thank you to Lauren Heidbrink, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Rebecca Galemba for seeing Semi-Structured as a possible home for this collection, trusting us with this vast collection, and bringing students into this process. Thank you to the 22 student contributors for your willingness to share your experiences and for the care, depth, and emotionality you brought to your pieces. Finally, thank you to our wonderful team of the Public Ethnography Lab fellows — Oscar Ellery, Aanya Baid, Marka Doolittle, Bennett Wright, and Asher Rosen — who supported this issue at every stage of its development and made this huge undertaking possible.
Thurka Sangaramoorthy
Editor-in-Chief, Semi-Structured
Elise Ferrer
Managing Editor
Public Ethnography Lab
October 2026
How to cite
Sangaramoorthy, Thurka and Elise Ferrer. 2026. “Welcome to Issue 3: A Note from the Editor-in-Chief of Semi-Structured.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34247505