Programs in Anthropology are excited to share that Anthropology & Education MA student Haley Planicka presented her research titled "Sanctuary in the Divide: Civil Initiative, Humanitarian Aid, and Asylum-Seeking in the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands" at the 2025 Society for Applied Anthropology conference. Her presentation at the SfAA conference in Portland, Oregon was part of a larger session on "Refugees and Displacement."

Planicka's study examines the principles that guide the work of humanitarian aid organizations operating along the Arizona-Mexico border, with a particular focus on the localized concept of "civil initiative." Developed as part of the Sanctuary Movement in Tucson during the 1980s, civil initiative has become a cornerstone for several humanitarian groups, each of which engages in peacebuilding and justice work in this complex region. This analysis centers the lived experiences of multiple volunteers as they work within the framework of civil initiative to “do justice” in the highly surveilled and politicized Southern Arizona borderlands. A central theme of this research is how organizations collaborate to carve out spaces of sanctuary, thus allowing them to confront the absence of meaningful or positive state intervention in border issues. From the operation of “civil initiative” on the ground, a dynamic arises in which the state apparatus both depends on and actively hinders or complicates this approach. By critically engaging civil initiative within the context of surveillance, invisibility, and power, this study aims to understand how the everyday resistance of local volunteers actively confronts state power to create new understandings of citizenship and belonging.

Pictured below are images from Planicka's summer fieldwork along the Arizona-Mexico border.