Jessica López-Espino recently defended her dissertation in anthropology at New York University. Her dissertation, “‘Crawling over Broken Glass’: The Legal Experience of Child Reunification in a California Child Welfare Court,” analyzes the interactions between parents and court professionals as they interactionally shape legal evaluations of parental fitness and determine what would be in children’s best interests. Her work draws on anthropology of law, linguistic anthropology, and Critical Race Theory to explore the particular experiences of Spanish-dominant Latinx parents in child welfare courts, the growing trend of Latinx involvement in child welfare, and issues in language access for Spanish-dominant speakers. Jessica is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for doctoral research. She received her BA in Anthropology and Applied Language Studies from University of California, Berkeley and her MPhil in Anthropology at New York University. She is currently a Law and Inequality Fellow at the American Bar Foundation.
