Stacey Vanderhurst

Teaching

Dr. Vanderhurst specializes in teaching qualitative research methods for the WGSS Department. She has developed and maintained the first undergraduate research requirement for WGSS majors and minors, helping students harness their own interests and goals into meaningful independent research and senior capstone projects. She also regularly teaches the graduate version of this course for WGSS doctoral and certificate students, with an emphasis on feminist epistemology and its applications in feminist research ethics and methods. Other previously taught courses address topics in international migration, global feminisms, and introduction to WGSS.

Research

Dr. Vanderhurst's first book, Unmaking Migrants, examines the contradictions of anti-trafficking campaigns that rescue women by force and work to rehabilitate them into a life they no longer want for themselves. How do migrants understand the dangers of traveling and how do they reconcile those risks with their desires for a better life? Who do these programs target and should they see themselves as victims? How do those in charge of these programs understand their responsibilities to migrants and to the nation? What happens when migrants resist the security protections ostensibly designed to help them, and how do these confrontations fit within other globalized schemes for border policing?

Unmaking Migrants engages these questions through an ethnographic study of a shelter for human trafficking victims — where few of the women identify as victims at all. The shelter is located in Nigeria, where over the past 15 years, thousands of willing migrant women have been stopped from traveling against their will. These women made arrangements to migrate from Nigeria to Europe, only to be stopped by Nigerian border agents, declared to be victims of human trafficking, and referred to Nigeria’s federal counter-trafficking agency for investigation, protection, and rehabilitation. Government officials proudly defend this form of intervention as preemptive, having successfully captured the women before any abuses have taken place. Yet most of the so-called victims in these cases do not see their experiences as trafficking and adamantly protest their detention, insisting they were not being trafficked and demanding to be released. This book documents the day-to-day confrontations between women detained in one shelter and the state agents trying to help them.

More recent and ongoing research explores how other state projects also police mobilty and sexuality in Nigeria, including police harrassment of women accused of being sex workers and feminist organizing against the police tactical unit that led to the worldwide #EndSARS protests.  

Service

Dr. Vanderhurst has served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the WGSS Department since 2017. In that role, she has worked to expand the role of undergraduate research in WGSS programs, restructuring curricular requirements, integrating skills across classes, and revising the senior capstone format, all while making the major and minor programs more flexible and accessible. Dr. Vanderhurst also serves on KU's Fulbright Campus Committee, the executive board of the Kansas African Studies Center, and the Advisory Board for the Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Center's Men's Action Project.