Focus on Immigration and Migration: Faculty Spotlight on Jessica Bruder ('04 M.S.)

We are pleased to present a new series about how Columbia Journalism School has been training its students to become leading reporters on topics related to immigration and migration. Around the globe, the work of journalists is essential for telling the stories of how the movement of people across borders has been impacting lives, politics and economies. In this faculty and alumni spotlight, we look at the work of award-winning journalist Jessica Bruder ('04 M.S.), who wrote WIRED's December 2019 cover story about a small group of East African immigrant workers in Minnesota who successfully organized to demand better labor conditions from Amazon, and, in so doing, now serve as models for tech workers across the United States.

Bruder, a 2004 graduate of the Part-time Master of Science Program and an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School, is currently developing a larger book project about the tight-knit community of East Africans working at an Amazon facility in Shakopee, Minnesota. Her reporting, supported by a New America Fellowship, follows their rise to the forefront of the American labor movement, examining their struggles through the prism of race, immigration, economic inequality, and anti-Muslim sentiment in the modern American workplace. 










At Columbia, Bruder teaches such Master of Science Program classes as "Subcultures: Narratives of the Invisible City" and "Introductory Reporting." An acclaimed chronicler of subcultures, Bruder is the author of the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, which follows the lives of Americans who, after losing their economic stability in Great Recession, have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves “workampers.” The book has been adapted into a forthcoming film from Fox Searchlight Pictures that stars Frances McDormand.  Bruder is also the author of Burning Book, a visual history of the Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert that captures the event's ethos of radical self-reliance and self-expression.

In early 2020, Verso Books will publish Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance, which Bruder co-authored with Columbia Journalism School professor Dale Maharidge. Their book recounts the strange analog backstory of two close friends thrown into one of the most significant whistle-blower dramas of our time. 

Please click here to watch Bruder discuss her experiences as a Columbia Journalism School student and teacher, and as a journalist who reports on subcultures, social issues and economic justice.

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