Strategic Citizenship, International Mobility, and the Pursuit of Freedom with Dr. Lewis Miles

Why are some Black Americans leaving the United States for Mexico? What do their migrations reveal about the unequal global terrain on which Black freedom is pursued? In this talk, Dr. Lewis Miles intervenes in debates on geoarbitrage, lifestyle migration, and strategic citizenship by centering Black migrants too often overlooked in scholarship on transnational mobility. Their absence, Miles argues, obscures a crucial nexus where domestic racial inequality meets global inequality. Drawing on interviews with over 130 migrants, Miles traces the entanglements of race, gender, and class beyond U.S. plotlines and within the social hierarchies of Mexico. Racially excluded and economically priced out of the ‘American Dream,’ these individuals pursue international mobility as part of a broader freedom project, even as they navigate and reproduce unequal social orders. Mapping the politics of exit and expatriation as embourgeoisement in the era of #Blaxit, Miles offers an urgent and nuanced account of Black migrations at the intersection of precarity, privilege, and the postcolonial.

Dr. Lewis Miles is a sociologist whose research sits at the intersection of international migration, race, gender, class, and Black political and social thought. He is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Dr. Miles’s work is featured in this year’s faculty fellow seminar through BSP Faculty Fellow Monika Gosin whose current work looks at the African Diaspora in the southern US borderlands.

RSVP asap by visiting bit.ly/bsppostdoctalk to support food orders. 

Friday, April 10, 2026 | 11:00AM-12:30PM (PST)

Public Engagement Building (PEB) 201

Food served on the terrace at 11:00AM

Presentation and discussion from 11:30AM-12:30PM