Im from Dilley, Texas, a small rural town outside of San Antonio. After graduating high school, I enrolled at Coastal Bend College in Beeville, Texas. I graduated Coastal Bend with an A.S. in Criminal Justice, then enrolled at Texas A&M–Kingsville (TAMUK) to work on a B.S. in Criminology with a minor in Sociology. While at TAMUK, I was accepted into the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program. As an undergraduate, this critical program allowed me the chance to conduct research with a faculty mentor, present in a research conference at Penn State, and get assistance with applying for gradiate programs in Sociology. In 2004, I was accepted into the M.S. program in Sociology at Oklahoma State University (OSU). At OSU, under the direction of renown social movements scholar Dr. Thomas Shriver, I set my research on the Chicano Movement, specifically, the East L.A. Brown Berets and their struggle with legal repression by authorities in the 1960s and 1970s. By 2006, I was accepted to the Ph.D. program in Sociology at the University of Missouri–Columbia (Mizzou). My Ph.D. advisor Dr. Tola Pearce, a prominent gender and human rights scholar, guided me through the process of investigating the impacts of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 on Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley residents. In 2011, I graduated with my Ph.D., it was one of the happiest moments of my life especially as a first-gen Ph.D. graduate. The theoretical knowledge and methodological training I gained while at Mizzou was tranformative and it continues to inform my sociological understanding. As an ethnographer, Ive spent the past fifteen years studying the social, political, and economic consequences of border security measures on the Texas–Mexico border, specifically, the Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley (RGV). Over the years, I have collaborated with Dr. James Thomas from the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) to explore affect, race, and space as they operate on college campuses and the U.S.–Mexico border. In addition, we have also investigated the changing racial landscape on the border with the predominance of Latina/o agents. We have taken this work to examine the expansion and intensification of militarization on the border to the core, or interior, of the United States. Most recently, my fellow Texas A&M–San Antonio colleague Dr. Joseph Simpson and I have examined the environmental consequences of militarization in the RGV. The oeuvre of my scholarly production reckons with the tethering of power, militarization, military-police assemblages, and environmental degradation that continue to disrupt and threaten border communities. As a professor, the classes that I teach at Texas A&M–San Antonio reflect my research interests and I can glean from my work and share those sociological insights with our students. I work hard to build meaningful pedagogical practices, sociological inquiry, and mentorship among my students to better prepare them for a complex, globalized world.

Dr. Correa’s Academia.edu webpage:

http://tamusa.academia.edu/JenniferGCorrea

RESEARCH AREAS

U.S.-Mexico Border Studies, Latinx Studies, Race & Ethnic Studies, Affect, State Theory, Environment, Feminist Theory, Human Rights, and Public Sociology   

PUBLICATIONS

Book

2016    Thomas, James M. and Jennifer G. Correa. Affective Labor: (Dis)Assembling Distance and Difference. Rowman & Littlefield Publisher. 

Peer Reviewed Journals

2022    Correa, Jennifer G. and Joseph M. Simpson "Building Walls, Destroying Borderlands: Repertoires of Militarization on the United   States-Mexico Border" Nature and Culture, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2022.170101.

2020    Simpson, Joseph M. and Jennifer G. Correa “Abrogation of Public Trust in the Protected Lands of the Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley” Society & Natural Resources, DOI: 10.1080/08941920.2020.1725203.

2018    Correa, Jennifer G. and James M. Thomas "From the Border to the Core: A Thickening Military Assemblage” Critical Sociology 1(1): 1-15

2016    Correa, Jennifer G. and Tola O. Pearce “These People have no Clue about us, the Land, or How We Live: Human Rights Concerns in Communities along the Texas–Mexico Border” Societies Without Borders 11: 1-44.

2015    Correa, Jennifer G. and James M. Thomas “The Rebirth of the U.S.–Mexico Border: Latino Enforcement Agents and the Changing Politics of Racial Power” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1: 239-254.  

2013    Correa, Jennifer G. “After 9/11 Everything Changed: Re-formations of State Violence in Everyday Life on the U.S.-Mexico border” Cultural Dynamics 25: 99-119.

2011    Correa, Jennifer G. “The Targeting of the East Los Angeles Brown Berets by a Racial Patriarchal Capitalist State: Merging  Intersectionality and Social Movement Research” Critical Sociology 37: 83-101.

TEACHING INTERESTS

U.S.-Mexico Border Studies, Latinx Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Qualitative/Ethnographic Methods, Classical & Contemporary Social Theory, Social Inequality, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.

Texas A&M University–San Antonio Courses

2016-Present: Principles of Sociology, Sociological Theory, Introduction to Mexican American, Latinx, and Borderlands Studies, Mexican Americans: Identity, Movements, and Social Justice, LGBTQ+ Studies, Social Movements.