Brown University anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte awarded MacArthur ‘genius grant’

Her interest in researching borders stems, in part, from her experience growing up in Lithuania, a former Soviet Socialist Republic with a complicated history of statehood that includes periods of expansion and occupation that lasted until its independence was restored in 1990.

"Coming from a very small country whose borders have shifted dramatically, I never took borders for granted," Jusionyte said. "They have always fascinated me as these artificial constructions but also extremely symbolically powerful things that people live and die for."

Her second book, "Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border," documents the experiences of emergency responders working on both sides of the border wall that separates Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico. A certified emergency medical technician and paramedic, Jusionyte embedded as a volunteer emergency responder as she researched the complex ethical and legal challenges facing the area's paramedics and firefighters.

In 2024, she published "Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border," which explores how the large volume of firearms that flow south from the U.S. to Mexico fuel homicide rates.

"I've always been interested in this cycle of violence between the United States and Mexico, and how we, through our policies, often make it worse, and what we can learn from the lived experiences of people who are most directly affected by border security policies," said Jusionyte, who teaches anthropology courses at Brown on topics including ethnographic research methods.

Her current research project is a natural progression from her last book's focus on gun trafficking, she said.

"What happens to the leaders of these major organized crime groups that we call cartels?" she said. "I realized that a lot of them were sitting in prisons in the United States, and their crimes in Mexico remain uninvestigated. This led me to this broader question: Can justice be exported from Mexico to the United States?"

Jusionyte is just beginning research on that question, which she said will likely take her several years to complete. Currently, three Brown students are supporting the project, helping to create a database of the thousands of people who have been extradited from Mexico and other Latin American countries to the U.S.