Karma R. Chávez
Associate Professor — Ph.D., Arizona State University
Department Chair and Associate Professor
Contact
- E-mail: karma.chavez@utexas.edu
- Phone: (512) 232-6888
- Office: GWB 2.102F
- Office Hours: W 2-4
- 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 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. In 2019, I published a book of interviews I conducted related to Palestine while hosting a radio show on WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin. That book is called Palestine on the Air.
I have co-edited three volumes, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (with Eithne Luibhéid, U of Illinois Press). I am a part of the feminist collective that co-edited the forthcoming volume, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (with Kyla Tompkins, Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, and Amber Musser, NYU Press).
My new book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance will be released from the University of Washington Press in spring 2021. The Borders of AIDS centers citizenship and immigration status to tell a story about how HIV/AIDS became an opportunity for powerful people in the US to enact "alienizing logic" against migrants, Black folks, and others. It also shows how people fought back.
With M. Adams, I am working on a collection of essays about our community-university collaborations in Madison, Wisconsin called, After Ferguson: Black, Queer, Feminist Experiments Against Police and Jails. Links to copies of most of my academic writing are here.
