Austin Kocher

Austin Kocher

I study America's immigration enforcement system.

Dr. Austin Kocher is the founding editor of the Law & Space. He is a Research Assistant Professor at Syracuse University that uses Freedom of Information Act requests to study the federal government. Kocher’s research interests focus on the political and legal geographies of racialized policing practices, local immigration enforcement, and the immigration court system. His ongoing work interrogates the legal rationalities and everyday practices of producing “illegalized” immigrants through the US immigration court system, and he uses cartographic, ethnographic, and quantitative methodologies to examine how the immigration courts link up with local immigration enforcement on the ground. His work also examines the strategies and impact of grassroots immigrant rights and worker rights movements that contest deportation as a tool of social and labor control.

Latest Articles

conferences

Now Available – Schedule for Graduate Voices in the Lawscape at the AAG in 2023

By Austin Kocher

The final schedule for the Legal Geography Specialty Group’s sessions titled Graduate Voices in the Lawscape at the upcoming AAG conference in Denver is now available. These three curated sessions feature new research from graduate students whose work intersects with law and space, often in critical and innovative ways.

conferences

Carceral Geography Conference Program Now Available

By Austin Kocher

The program for the 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography is now out and registration is open. The 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography, a hybrid conference (in-person and online) in Melbourne, Australia on Tuesday the 13th, Wednesday the 14th and Thursday the 15th of December 2022.

conferences

Join the Next Carceral Geography Conference in December 2022

By Austin Kocher

The 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography will be held in Australia as a two-day hybrid event (in-person and online) hosted by the University of Melbourne, 14-15 December 2022. The conference theme for 2022 is Confinement: spaces and practices of care and control.