Katy Maldonado Dominguez (she/her) is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her experiences as a Central American immigrant inform the question at the heart of her work: How do people find belonging? She uses displacement as a framework to understand the way various communities respond to and challenge social, political, legal, and economic systems that disenfranchise them and insist on stripping them of community, place, and identity. She is interested in exploring these themes in the lives of Central American students, undocumented queer parents, migrant caravans, and undocumented scholars.

As an interdisciplinary scholar she positions her work at the intersections of Ethnic Studies, Central American Studies, Critical Human Geography, Critical University Studies, and Public Humanities.

She received her Bachelor’s Degrees in Chicana/o Studies and Geography from UCLA. Her dissertation, Displaced Kinship: A Politics of Belonging Among Central American Students, explores how children of Central American immigrants inherit and draw from legacies of displacement to articulate their identities, develop a political consciousness, and navigate higher education. Drawing from 40 interviews with students, she proposes a theoretical framework she names “displaced kinship” to demonstrate how Central American students refuse the disenfranchisement that displacement creates for their families and in this refusal develop a form of belonging.