Ethics of Migration:

Lori Gallegos moderates a discussion among scholars, engaged community members, and a legal expert on the role of philosophy with respect to the ethics and politics of migration.

This roundtable discussion focuses on the ethics of migration and explores the role individuals, collectives, and institutions play in processes of social and political change. Immigration attorney Rebecca Kitson, artist Yehimi Cambrón, and philosopher Lori Gallegos come together to discuss how each of them use their work to advance migration justice and to examine the limitations and unexplored possibilities of their respective fields for doing this work.

Dr. Lori Gallegos is Associate Professor of philosophy at Texas State University and the editor of APA Studies on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy. She works in the areas of Latinx philosophy and the philosophy of emotions. In her research on emotion, she utilizes methods and theories in philosophy, combined with research findings in psychology, to better understand the ways in which human experience is shaped by the societies that are the source of our emotion concepts and norms. This work often focuses on the experiences of people in Latin American immigrant communities in the U.S. Her publications have appeared in edited volumes and in journals including Hypatia, Philosophical Topics, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race, Topoi, and the Inter-American Journal of Philosophy. She is also co-editor, with Manuel Vargas and Francisco Gallegos, of The Latinx Philosophy Reader (Routledge, 2025).

Rebecca Kitson holds a B.A., with honors and distinction in the major, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and obtained her J.D. cum laude from the University of New Mexico School of Law. In May of 2012, Rebecca established her own firm, where she continues to practice the spectrum of Immigration Law, including employment and family-based immigration and removal defense. Rebecca has also been an adjunct professor of law at the University of New Mexico School of Law (UNMSOL) since 2009. Rebecca has been recognized as a Woman of Influence (2020) by Albuquerque Business First, and was a C-Suite Award Finalist (2017) for the same publication. She was accepted into and graduated from the Goldman Sach’s 10,000 Small Business Program (2019). She was recognized by the New Mexico Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Board with their Distinguished Achievement Award (2016), for her contributions to professionalism in the state. The State Bar of New Mexico also awarded her the CLE Peak Award (2013). Rebecca enjoys the highest peer rating (AV) from Martindale-Hubbell (since 2012). 
 

Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist born in Michoacán, México, and hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta's Civil Rights Movement legacy offered a springboard for activism that helped Cambrón navigate living in an anti-immigrant state while undocumented. This spirit of resistance informs her practice as she explores her lived experience and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation.

Cambrón's practice is an expression of undocumentedness that draws from her family's lineages of labor.  Her work intertwines the labor of love in fiber methods that persist after crossing the border and the self-taught labor of furniture production that sustains her family today and has enabled them to thrive on their own terms.

Through intergenerational and matriarchal modes of making, Cambrón reclaims discarded materials from her family's furniture projects. By transforming remnants of textile, vinyl, and leather into portraits and abstracted works and installations, she generates various pathways to maneuver in and out of visibility. This agency to visually code-switch is a critical tactic in her work as she confronts the state violence imposed on undocumented people. Reclaiming discarded materials through crocheting, sewing, and netting gives her a loving way to hold her community's precarity while subverting the ways this country animalizes and criminalizes them.

Cambrón earned a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) as a 2023 fellow of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She has had solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina's Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023), which acquired her painting Estela Tejiendo I. She has exhibited at the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and exhibited and curated at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Cambrón is currently based in Chicago, IL, as an Artist-In-Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition.