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Poem / Human Rights

Expert Witness Reviews Exhibits for Asylum Proceedings, Franco-González Class Member

A poet-anthropologist who has been an expert witness in asylum proceedings for Mexican nationals resists dehumanizing legal and political language to make space for the humanity of asylum-seekers.
Shot from above, a close-up photograph features a cluster of flowers with white petals and yellow centers with green blades of grass growing out of a rough, rocky plot of brown soil.

Whitney L. Duncan

“Expert Witness Reviews Exhibits for Asylum Proceedings, Franco-González Class Member” is part of the collection Poems of Witness and Possibility: Inside Zones of Conflict. Read the introduction to the collection here.

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Whitney L. Duncan is a Colorado-based anthropologist, author, and activist whose creative and academic work centers on immigration, global mental health, and the intersections between culture, the body, and the natural world. Her books include Transforming Therapy: Mental Health Practice and Cultural Change in Mexico and the forthcoming co-edited volume Accompaniment With Im/migrant Communities: Ethnographic Engagements (with Kristin Elizabeth Yarris). Duncan is a professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado and adjunct faculty at the Colorado School of Public Health. She was a founding member of the Anthropologist Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees and is a member of the 2023–2024 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective. She serves as an expert witness for the National Qualified Representative Program.

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