Anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte discussed her newly published book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border. With gripping images from the fieldwork she has conducted in the US-Mexico Borderlands, Jusionyte walked the audience through the central idea of the book: so much of the violence from which people in Mexico flee is facilitated by firearms from the United States. With individual stories of people affected by, engaged in, or trying to curtail gun violence, she detailed how the circulation of guns and the circulation of violence is co-produced through exploitation of the legal asymmetries of the US and Mexico. 

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. A legal and medical anthropologist who studies, teaches and writes about violence and security, she is the author of three books, including multiple award-winning ethnography, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018) and Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border( (April 2024). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Fulbright Program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, among others. In addition to academic journals, such as American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Jusionyte has written for The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian, and discussed her research broadly in the media, including on BBC and NPR. Jusionyte is the editor of the California Series in Public Anthropology, and she is a member of the Advisory Committee of Global Action on Gun Violence and the Research Network to Prevent Gun Violence in the Americas.