Welcome
Welcome to the ABS Graduate Hub: a dedicated space for students, graduates, and early-career researchers working across the field of border studies, whether your path runs toward academia, government, or practice.
Borders are more than lines on a map. They are sites of economy, culture, security, and lived experience, and the questions they raise cut across disciplines from geography and history, to law, anthropology, and international relations. This hub brings together the next generation of scholars grappling with these questions, offering a place to connect, share work, and build networks.
Here you’ll find resources on funding and publishing, opportunities to present emerging research, mentorship connections with established scholars, and news about graduate events, panels, and professional development across our conferences and beyond. Whether you’re framing a dissertation, preparing your first article, or navigating the path into academia or practice, the Graduate Hub is here to support your journey.
GRADUATE REPRESENTATIVE
Introducing Michelle Ochoa
The Association for Borderlands Studies is pleased to introduce Michelle Ochoa as our Graduate Representative. In this position, Michelle serves as the liaison between the ABS Board and the association’s graduate community: she brings the perspectives of emerging scholars into board discussions and coordinates graduate-focused initiatives, including relaying opportunities, resources, and mentoring connections.
Michelle is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Texas A&M University and a Mellon-RESI Dissertation Fellow. Her dissertation, The Transborder Lifestyle: Studying, Parenting, and Schooling Across Borders, is a multi-sited ethnography of K–12 students and families who cross the U.S.–Mexico border daily across five Texas–Mexico border towns. A native bilingual scholar and former transborder student herself, she grew up crossing the Matamoros–Brownsville bridge daily for school and brings both lived experience and rigorous fieldwork to her research.
Her service record includes board membership with the National Hispanic and Latino Studies Association, directing Texas A&M’s Aggie Collaborate Program, and organising bilingual scholarly sessions and conference panels across regional and national associations.
Graduate members with questions, ideas, or interest in getting involved are encouraged to reach out to Michelle.
FEATURED MEMBERS
Dr. Deboleena Sengupta
Deboleena is a scholar of Political Science (MA, MPhil, PhD), specializing in citizenship and border studies. Her doctoral thesis has been awarded as the “Best Dissertation 2026” by the Association for Borderlands Studies. She has published with peer-reviewed platforms such as Economic and Political Weekly, Social Action, and Orient BlackSwan. She has also been a Kochi Dialogue Research Fellow (2025), contributing to policy research for the Centre for Public Policy Research and the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. She is currently engaged in a Canadian-led New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) project at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
Deboleena’s doctoral work examined the politics of citizenship in the India-Bangladesh border enclaves following the 2015 Land Boundary Agreement. Her research showed how the physically nonexistent enclave borders continue to reappear across different times and spaces, even after their dissolution. The work therefore explains the socio-economic and political bordering that happens within a state’s territory, rather than solely at its geographical edges.
Vianey Rueda
Vianey Rueda is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, where she leads research on the Rio Grande/Bravo for the Global Center for Climate Change and Transboundary Waters. Her work focuses on understanding the impacts of climate change on transboundary water agreements, with an emphasis on how riparian countries can adapt and modernize treaties to address emerging challenges. A native of San Elizario, Texas, Vianey’s interest in environmental science and policy was sparked early through her experiences on the family farm and her proximity to the Rio Grande/Bravo. Witnessing the increasingly dry river and the growing strain on local agriculture due to water scarcity and climate change motivated her to explore sustainable solutions. Today, her research leverages science and policy to help build sustainable, equitable, and politically viable socio-hydrological systems.
Vianey Rueda’s manuscript has been awarded as the “Best Graduate Paper 2026” by the Association for Borderland Studies and argues that international water treaties, which have long guided resource allocation and conflict resolution among riparian nations, require modernization given ongoing changing hydrological and societal conditions.
MEMBER NEWS
Reflections from the Tijuana Border: A Winter Academy Fieldwork Account
In early 2026, Yacine Ait-Larbi (University of Amsterdam), together with Gabriella Sanchez (Georgetown University) and Jaime Alejandro Olayo Méndez (Boston College), secured a Decolonial Futures Seed Grant to run a week-long winter academy at the US-Mexico border in Tijuana. In this reflection, he shares what he took away from the experience.
The piece opens with an “unsettling wander” through San Diego and a crossing into Mexico, then moves through a week of conversations with a wide range of people connected to the border: government officials, migrants, shelter administrators, and the staff who run migrant programs.
A recurring theme in Yacine’s account is the complexity of the border as a lived environment. Public discussion, he suggests, tends to focus heavily on hardship and disruption, and while the US-Mexico border offers a clear vantage point on how lives are affected, his fieldwork also drew his attention to the ways communities adapt, organise, and sustain daily life within it. The reflection sits with both dimensions rather than settling on one.
A grounded, first-hand fieldwork account, and a useful read for graduate researchers working on borders, migration, and mobility.
To read the full blog, download here: IMI Academy 2026 – La Frontera Es Vida
Find ot more here: University of Amsterdam Decolonial Futures
