Elizabeth G. Kennedy is the Central America Monitor Research Director at WOLA, LAPOP’s 2023-2024 Honduras expert and a 2023-2024 Fulbright Scholar to El Salvador. She is a social scientist researching migration and human rights issues primarily based from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras or the US-Mexico border since 2011. She also worked as a case worker and teacher for several years in low-income communities and holds an executive certificate in nonprofit management from Georgetown University.
In the past decade, she has led widely-cited, collaborative research with gendered analyses on complex humanitarian crises examining overlapping impunity, inequality, violence, climate change and other factors. Qualitatively, she has interviewed over 1,700 Central American migrants and 250 officials and service providers in aforementioned nations, in addition to compiling innovative and substantial quantitative databases to triangulate the information collected in these interviews. She has done the research independently and with Human Rights Watch (HRW), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a Fulbright student fellowship, Tinker Grant, and others, including film makers, journalists, a playwright, and numerous immigration attorneys.
She has authored or co-authored peer-reviewed articles in high-impact academic journals, policy reports, book chapters, media articles, internal reports and blog entries, including Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse (2020). She has further disseminated this research through frequent presentations to legal, medical and social service providers, government officials, immigration courts and print, radio and television outlets in various countries.