Affiliated Scholars

Mahsun Oti is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, New Jersey. A native of Kurdistan, Oti holds an M.A. in African Studies from the University of Basel, Switzerland. His research sits at the crossroads of the anthropology of citizenship, critical immigration studies, settler colonial and carceral studies, and the anthropology of care and solidarity. For his master’s research, he conducted fieldwork in South Africa on the Rhodes Must Fall Movement, exploring how decolonial protest and the politics of memory intersect with colonial and apartheid histories.  

His dissertation research focuses on Operation Metro Surge, the federal ICE enforcement surge that began in December 2025 in Minneapolis, and its profound impacts on the Somali community in Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali diaspora in North America. Oti is currently conducting his ethnographic fieldwork in Minneapolis between June 2026 and August 2027 and examines how Minneapolis residents, particularly the Somali community, have mobilized through dense infrastructures of mutual aid, rapid-response networks, ICE watch patrols, and civic assemblies to contest deportability, defend belonging, and sustain democratic life under authoritarian enforcement.

Ayantu Tibeso is an Affiliated Scholar at the Immigration History Research Center, where she focuses on community archiving and knowledge preservation within the Oromo and African community in Minnesota. Ayantu’s doctoral research examined how Indigenous people maintain sovereign ways of knowing under conditions of ongoing colonial violence. As an archivist and first-generation African immigrant, Ayantu brings critical insight to questions of how marginalized communities preserve and transmit knowledge outside institutions like libraries, archives and universities. Her dissertation research from UCLA interrogates the complex dynamics between official knowledge institutions and Indigenous modes of information transmission. Her work on the impact of Ethiopian colonial archives on Indigenous people has been presented at the International Conference on the History of Records and Archives, African Studies Association, and the Archival Education and Research Initiative.

Beyond scholarly research, Ayantu actively works to make marginalized histories accessible. She recently completed a significant project at the Immigration History Research Center Archives, processing and making publicly accessible thousands of photographs from La Prensa de Minnesota, the first Latino newspaper in the state of Minnesota.  Her practice as an archivist and scholar centers on supporting Indigenous and marginalized communities to maintain sovereign knowledge practices despite systemic obstacles. Ayantu is currently the project assistant for the African Studies Initiative housed within the Institute for Global Studies, where she works to support the growth of African Studies at the University of Minnesota.