Peter Mancina

Junior Guest of the Principal, SCAS.
Research Associate, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford

Peter Mancina is Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford.
He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Vanderbilt University in 2016 following the completion
of ethnographic fieldwork and archival analysis examining how “sanctuary city” policies in the United
States empower local law enforcement agents to help deport individuals convicted of crimes.

Mancina is the author of “Investigating and (Not) Disciplining Violations of Sanctuary Laws” in the
Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal (2019); “Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Power”
in the book Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2019); “The
Birth of a Sanctuary City: A History of Governmental Sanctuary in San Francisco” in the book Sanctuary
Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Movements (Routledge, 2012);
and “Crisis-Management: Tzeltal-Maya Transnational Migration and the Foucauldian Apparatus” in the
journal Dialectical Anthropology (2011). He has recently authored a public policy implementation report -
Turning the Golden State into a Sanctuary State: A Report on the Impact and Implementation of the Cali-
fornia Values Act (SB54) – that describes how local law enforcement in California is continuing to assist
in deportations despite the new state sanctuary law’s extensive prohibitions on such activities.

At SCAS, Mancina will work on his book Sanctuary City in the Age of Mass Deportation examining three
decades of governmental experiments with sanctuary city protocols in San Francisco, California. He will
additionally examine how sanctuary cities provide a model of governance that does not rely on national
citizenship to operate and which therefore may survive in possible futures that include increased undocu-
mented mobility, the collapse of nation states, or the end of national borders.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2019-20.