Annie Fukushima

Annie Isabel Fukushima, Ph.D. is currently the Assistant Vice Provost of Student Success and Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research overseeing campus-wide undergraduate research activities at the University of Utah, supporting research across the disciplines. As faculty she is Associate Professor of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies at the University of Utah. For 2023, she was the Lead Fellow for the School for Cultural & Social Transformation Mellon funded Transformative Intersectional Collective (TRIC). In 2020 - 2021, she was a University of Utah Presidential Leadership fellow. And co-directed a postdoctoral training program that brings together science education and humanistic inquiry, with her collaborator Dr. Ramón Barthelemy, "Postdoctoral Training Program to Develop Critical Research Skills" also known as "Queering STEM Education" funded by NSF (2023 – 2025). She is also the Project Lead & Co-Principal Investigator for the Gender-Based Violence Consortium and served as the co-lead for the Institute of Impossible Subjects project, "Migratory Times." In 2024, Dr. Fukushima served as the Co-Director with Drs. Tina Chen (Penn State University) and Kristin Roebuck (Cornell University), for the Summer Institute, “Involuntary Migration,” Global Asias Initiative at Penn State University.

Prior to joining the faculty of University of Utah, Dr. Fukushima was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University (2013 -2015) with the Institute for Research on Women and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. She received her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies.

She is the author of the award-winning book Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US (Stanford University Press, 2019) where she examines witnessing immigrant communities of Latinidad and Asian/Asian American diasporas, when they experience violence during or after the crossing into the United States. Migrant Crossings received the American Sociological Association book award on Asia America. Migrant Crossings has received positive reviews. 

“Migrant Crossings brilliantly dissects our understandings of the plight of Latina and Asian women trafficked into informal economies of sex and service. Combining original analysis of court cases, news accounts, and police reports with the author’s experience as a volunteer counselor, Fukushima reveals a legal system that requires a survivor’s story to fit the model of ‘perfect victimhood’ in order to cross into visibility and be deemed worthy of asylum.” Evelyn Nakano Glenn, University of California, Berkeley

 

“Migrant Crossings critically examines the framing and impact of the U.S. anti-human trafficking movement. Annie Fukushima explores how our work in the movement is often at odds with our stated objectives and reveals how an individual’s experiences are shaped by a racist, misogynistic, and colonialist history. A deeply important read for all of us working to realize the promise of human rights.” Jean Bruggeman, Executive Director, Freedom Network USA

 

“Migrant Crossings offers a deeply insightful analysis of the structures of human trafficking. It illustrates linkages between labor migration and human trafficking while convincing readers that vulnerability to human trafficking belongs in a historical continuum of U.S. racial exclusion.” Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, author of Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work

 

Additionally, Migrant Crossings has been reviewed in peer-review journals including Humanity & Society, Human Rights Quarterly, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, and American Journal of Sociology

In 2025, she co-edited in collaboration with Dr. K. Melchor Quick Hall, Decolonial Feminist Genealogies and Futures, published with University Illinois Press. The edited anthology was considered by Ms. Magazine best of 2025 books. 

Dr. Fukushima's commitments are to communities where she has served as an expert witness on immigration, civil, and criminal cases and serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition, a member of the board of directors for the Asian Association of Utah, and member of the Board of Trustees for the Salt Lake Acting Company. She also serves on the Freedom Network USA Steering Committee.