PROVIDENCE – Ieva Jusionyte, author of “Exit Wounds,” has been awarded a 2025 MacArthur “genius” fellowship.

Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University, where she also serves as the Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies.

In April of 2024, Jusionyte conducted an in-depth interview with ConvergenceRI, talking about the premise of her book, captured in the story’s headline: “To halt the vicious cycle of border violence, stop the flow of guns." [See link to story below.]

In the ConvergenceRI interview, Jusionyte, who is originally from Lithuania, talked about the arbitrary nature of borders and political boundaries. “Whenever we talk about borders, we must understand this arbitrariness, this historical and political nature of them, and not take them for granted,” she said.

“On the other hand, the borders are also very real – they are enforced with walls made of steel and concrete that kill and injure people who are trying to cross them. But these types of borders tend to reinforce the inequalities on both sides that give rise to them in the first place.”

In her autographed copy of her new book, Jusionyte had written, hopefully: “To Richard: For a world with fewer bullets and wounds.”

A few months later, in September of 2024, Jusionyte gave a reading at Symposium Books in Providence. ConvergenceRI covered the event. [See link to ConvergenceRI story, “There is a man with a gun over there…”]

Crossing the borders.    
Jusionyte’s book is not light reading; it is storytelling from the darker side of the world, sharing true stories of those who are caught up in the smuggling arms trade.

Her book makes a bold statement – what amounts to the antithesis of the all the lies being told by the Trump administration about border violence and who is responsible for it.

In great factual detail, interwoven with haunting human stories, Jusionyte documents how the violence in Mexico is directly linked to the illegal smuggling of arms and ammunitions, manufactured in the United States, but sold to the gun-hungry cartels.

Jusionyte, much like science writer Rebecca Altman, author of the forthcoming book, “The Song of Styrene: An intimate history of plastics,” is one of several writers in Rhode Island who represent a new age of storytellers, ones who do not shy away from telling the hard truths we face.

In her dedication to her book, Jusionyte quoted poet Ocean Vuong, from his book, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” ‘Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.’

A presentation about her book, recorded at the Watson Institute on April 23, 2024, offers the kind of in-depth analysis that offers a healthy antidote to the political posturing that fills our airwaves these days. [See link below.]

Room for thought    
Because my filing system for my books is non-existent; my books sprawl throughout my studio apartment. It took me more than a day to rummage through the stacks to find Jusionyte’s 2024 book. My visiting caregivers – occupational therapists, physical therapists, and nurse care managers – had never heard of Jusionyte or, for that matter, the MacArthur fellowship.

Jusionyte’s name is not a household word in Providence; but perhaps it should be, given the relevance of her work to the conflicted world we are facing. For sure, Jusionyte is not a frequent guest on the numerous radio or TV political talk shows. The question to ask is: Why not?

What follows is a reprint of both ConvergenceRI stories featuring Ieva Jusionyte, in honor of 2025 MacArthur Award.

“There is a man with a gun over there…” [Sept. 9, 2024]

PROVIDENCE – On the eve of PVDFest, the pedestrian traffic along Westminster Street in downtown is crowded with shoppers, diners, and panhandlers. ConvergenceRI is on his way to a reading at Symposium Books, featuring author Ieva Jusionyte from her new book, Exit Wounds, a compelling journey into the netherworld of gun smuggling and violence across the border in Mexico.

Jusionyte, an associate professor of Anthropology at Brown University, who trained as an EMT and a medic, was taught to look for the “exit wounds” when treating gunshot victims along the U.S. border with Mexico.

As she pointed out during her reading, there are only two legal gun shops in all of Mexico. The rest of the guns used in the many violent encounters are smuggled in from the U.S. As much as what has happened at the border between the United States and Mexico has become a prominent part of the political debate within American presidential politics, few have the kind of expertise that Jusionyte brings to the table.

In Providence, there has been a wave of gun violence; one of the most recent shootings claimed the life of a seven-year-old child who was sitting in the backseat of car, resulting in outrage in the community.

The audience of about 25 who had gathered for Jusionyte’s reading asked probing questions about the nature of the gun violence in Mexico and its perpetrators – often young men and women who have become the soldiers in the violent struggle between rival organized criminals – and pawns in the battle for control of the economic enterprise attached to guns, money, and drugs.

 In her signed copy of her book from a reading at the Watson Institute on April 23, Jusionyte wrote: “For a world with fewer bullets and wounds.”

For all the political charges thrown back and forth between rival Presidential candidates and their surrogates, the insights spoken by Jusionyte about what is actually occurring on the border between the U.S. and Mexico appear to lack an audience. Would Jusionyte be willing to sit down and talk with R.I. Attorney General Peter Neronha about gun violence and gun smuggling? She said she would welcome the opportunity.

Some 48 hours after her reading, a battle took place on Westminster Street outside the storefront of Symposium Books. It was a battle of the bands, featuring the “Extraordinary Rendition Band” and the 88th Army Band – RI Army National Guards’s Coyote Brass, captured by WPRO’s Steve Klamkin. [See link to video below.]

It may be a leap, but the way that the two bands interact, exchanging musical arguments, provides a way forward on how to reach resolution of conflict. Our ability to listen to each other, allowing conflicting voices to be heard, offers a hopeful way forward. The stories that Jusionyte shared about "exit wounds" offers a way to understand the conflict around borders and boundaries and not get sucked into the undertow of misinformation and disinformation.

“To halt the vicious circle of border violence, stop the flow of guns” [April 8, 2024] 

PROVIDENCE – When Ieva Jusionyte reports on the exit wounds caused by gun violence, her knowledge and expertise are not merely an academic exercise. Jusionyte knows the subject first hand, intimately, having worked as an EMT and paramedic, volunteering at the migrant aid clinics along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Her new book, published by the University of California Press, features a cover sleeve designed with actual holes in it, lending a graphic quality to the conversation.

And, in addition to her experience in treating actual gunshot wounds that were a result of the daily carnage of border violence, Jusionyte brings her own lived experience as a resident of Vilnius in Lithuania – a small Baltic republic that borders on Russia, with a convoluted history of disputed political boundaries. Her lived history, Jusionyte explained, “made me realize that not all borders are the same. Some are built like prisons to contain people inside; others are built like forts to stop people who want to enter.”

Here is the ConvergenceRI interview with Ieva Jusionyte, now in the midst of a national book tour. She will be talking about her book at the Watson Institute at Brown University on Tuesday afternoon, April 23.

ConvergenceRI:  Your book, Exit Wounds, covers/explores/redefines the shape-shifting narrative around borders, guns, violence and women. Is that an accurate description of your work?      
JUSIONYTE: The book provides a narrative that links some of the most critical, urgent issues in the United States today – gun violence, drug addiction, migration, and border security – showing how we have created this vicious circle of violence, in which we have been stuck. Our guns are going south to Mexico and Central America and beyond into the hands of organized crime groups that smuggle the drugs that fuel the addiction epidemic in our communities.

Because of the violence of these groups, we are also seeing thousands of migrants and refugees arriving each month desperately seeking safety on this side of the border. It is all linked and the guns are a key element in this chain.

ConvergenceRI: When we talk about borders, what is the best way to talk about boundaries that always appear to be in flux?      
JUSIONYTE: Borders are political constructions, so they shift historically depending on who has the power to set them. The U.S.-Mexico border came to be after the United States invaded Mexico and, with US forces occupying the Mexican capital, demanded large territories that previously belonged to Mexico to be handed over to U.S. control.

It was part of our frontier settlement, justified by the idea of manifest destiny. But this boundary, established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and later corrected through the Gadsden Purchase, is between Mexico and the United States.

It completely ignores the fact that other sovereign nations don’t recognize these borders imposed on their ancestral lands by two relatively new nation-states.

So, whenever we talk about borders, we must understand this arbitrariness, this historical and political nature of them, and not take them for granted.

On the other hand, the borders are also very real – they are enforced with walls made of steel and concrete that kill and injure people who are trying to cross them. But these types of borders tend to reinforce the inequalities on both sides that give rise to them in the first place.

ConvergenceRI: How has your personal history – as a resident of Lithuania and of Vilnius – influenced your sense of borders and boundaries?    
JUSIONYTE: Growing up in Lithuania, I learned just how impermanent borders are in the long run. I was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain and watched the Berlin Wall fall and Lithuania become independent from the Soviet Union.

But almost as soon as the newly independent country marked its own borders, they dissolved because Lithuania joined the European Union.

Borders in Europe in general and in the part of Europe that was my home shifted so much over the centuries. Knowing that history made me not take any borders for granted, but to see them as products of a particular historical period, as temporary projections of power during certain configurations of international order.

It also made me realize that not all borders are the same. Some are built like prisons to contain people inside; others are built like forts to stop people who want to enter.

But either way, fortified borders are, as political theorist Wendy Brown said, symptoms of waning state sovereignty. They only seem to control the movement of people or goods, but, in reality, they don’t work for that.

ConvergenceRI: Having worked as an EMT with refugees as patients along the Mexican-U.S. border, can you talk about the way that your own personal safety and calculations about risk influenced your writings?    
JUSIONYTE: Working as an EMT and paramedic and volunteering at the migrant aid clinic on the border was what initially led me to do this research – to follow the guns from Arizona and Texas to various parts of Mexico.

Seeing people fleeing violence and insecurity in their communities, I wanted to go in the opposite direction, to understand the role of our guns in the making of this violence.

I had seen gunshot wounds before. I had seen people die from them before we could rush them to the hospital, and I was at first quite concerned that hanging out around people with guns would put me at risk of being shot, most likely accidentally.

So, I tried to learn as much about handling guns safely as I could: how to make sure they are unloaded, for example. But the book itself looks at gun wounds more expansively.

They not only injure and kill individuals; the social effects of gun violence extend to the community and to the region. These effects are passed from generation to generation. I use the language of medical forensics to talk about much broader societal issues.

ConvergenceRI: You recently wrote a provocative essay about buying a gun for the first time. What did you learn about yourself as part of that process?     
JUSIONYTE: I bought a gun because I needed to become familiar with it as a thing, an object, as a tool.

Before I started this project and before I owned a gun, I was appalled by them and afraid of them. It was difficult for me to spend years of my life studying something that I felt so uncomfortable with.

I also thought that owning a gun would be the best way for me to understand my relationship to this thing that has become so politicized in the contemporary United States.

I think what the process taught me is that it is quite easy to get used to something I feared. But it also taught me that owning a gun did not provide me with the answers I was seeking. It did not make me more comfortable being a member of this society where guns have such a prominent place, where they outnumber people.

ConvergenceRI: Have you had the opportunity to engage with Dr. Megan Ranney, M.D., [now the dean of the Yale School of Public Health] and talk with her about her ongoing research on gun violence?    
JUSIONYTE: Yes, I had the pleasure of talking to Megan when I just started teaching at Brown, in the spring of 2021. She taught me a lot about gun violence in Rhode Island.

ConvergenceRI: Have you had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Rebecca Altman, Ph.D., about her writing and research about plastics?    
JUSIONYTE: Yes, I have met Rebecca and I have read some of her brilliant magazine stories. I really look forward to her book [The Song of Styrene: An Intimate History of Plastics.]

ConvergenceRI: I have been intrigued by the choices you have made in your narrative style of writing. Could you talk about how you have approached your descriptive prose?    
JUSIONYTE: It was very important to me to write this book in a narrative style that readers would find engaging.

Let’s be honest: how many people go to the bookstore and leave with a book about guns and violence because they are so eager to delve into the story? These are very difficult subjects.

Usually, only those people who are working on these issues, as scholars or activists or policymakers, care enough to spend their time reading such books. I wanted to write a book about these troubling issues that would not underestimate how heavy the subject is, but do so in a prose that is easy to follow, in a style that makes you want to turn the pages.

The book has a braided narrative, so we follow the lives of several people [a member of an organized crime group, an entrepreneur who is a gun buff, a crime journalist, two federal agents chasing gun traffickers], but there are also sections that provide historical background to guns in the U.S. and in Mexico and their movement across the border.

Ieva Jusionyte, Ph.D., is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology, Director of Graduate Admissions, Department of Anthropology, Brown University.