Abigail Escatel is a Ph.D. Candidate on the Rhetoric track of Communication Studies. Abigail is also a Lulu Merle Johnson Fellow and a teaching fellow for the Center of Teaching. Her area of expertise explores the history of detaining the migrant child. In her dissertation she analyzes the 1980's as the "decade where practices of detaining migrant children come of age." She amasses almost 50 years of archival research that is historicized in over a century of US-Mexican borderland practices of colonial exclusion. Her areas of research include Rhetorical studies, Gender Women and Sexuality studies, Latina/o/x studies, and Decolonial studies.