Karma R. Chávez
Associate Professor — Ph.D., Arizona State University
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Contact
- E-mail: karma.chavez@utexas.edu
- Phone: (512) 232-6888
- Office: GWB 2.306
- Campus Mail Code: F9200
Biography
My scholarship is primarily informed by queer of color theory and women of color feminism. Methodologically, I am a rhetorical critic who variously utilizes textual and field based methods. I am interested in studying social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics. My work emphasizes the rhetorical practices of groups marginalized within existing power structures, but I also attend to rhetoric produced by powerful institutions and actors about marginalized folks and the systems that oppress them (e.g., immigration system, prisons etc.). In 2013, I published my first book, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, which examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. I have also co-edited two volumes, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Methodand Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies.I am working on a new manuscript, AIDS Knows No Borders, which explores AIDS activism and organizing on the issue of immigration and within immigrant communities during what is often described as the height of the AIDS pandemic in North America (1981-1995). I am also working on a collection of essays about the role of the university in its community, tentatively titled, The Reluctant Academic. Links to copies of most of academic writing are here.
I recently left the University of Wisconsin – Madison where I taught in the Department of Communication Arts and the Program in Chican@ and Latin@ Studies for six years. In Spring of 2016, I was a research fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW.
In Spring of 2012, I was a visiting scholar at the Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. I am the co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network, with Eithne Luibhéid, which co-hosted an international symposium in Tucson, Arizona in October 2014. Alongside my academic pursuits, I work with various grassroots social justice organizations and collectives, including helping to organize LGBT Books to Prisoners. For four years in Madison, I also hosted 89.9 FM WORT's lunch hour program, A Public Affair every Wednesday.
