Rebecca Fowler has been active in the Tucson borderlands community since 2010. At that time she became aware of the human crisis and the terrible reality that thousands of migrants had died for lack of water while crossing the Arizona Sonoran Desert. Rebecca moved to Pullman, Washington in 2011 to pursue graduate studies at Washington State University, and the crisis on the Arizona border became the focal point of the work she was carrying out during her 6-year stint at WSU. Every summer and Christmas vacation, she returned to Tucson to volunteer with desert humanitarian aid, and to research the causes and conditions of the crisis unfolding on the border. Her dissertation, The Sanctuary Movement Never Ended: An Examination of Humane Borders, Tucson Samaritans, and No More Deaths Counter-Conducts, focuses on the work of Tucson desert aid organizations against the historical background of the 1980's Tucson Sanctuary Movement. In 2016 she completed her Ph.D. in American Studies in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies.

Rebecca currently teaches online courses in Diversity. Within this context, she seizes opportunities to raise student awareness about the causes and conditions that trigger migrant Diasporas globally as well as to educate them about the trench work being carried out by desert humanitarians along the U.S./Mexico border. One of her works, "The Role of Arizona Desert Humanitarians in Compassionate Migration," appears in Compassionate Migration: A Regional Policy Vision for the Americas edited by William F. Arrocha and Steven W. Bender (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).