ACADEMICS
PhD. Communicatión. UCSD, 2023.
MFA. Creative Writing. UCSD, 2016.
As an academic, my published areas of research are border studies, arts-based production/research and speculative genres, focusing on the relationship between media, matter and metaphor in places where categories enter into crisis and possibilities abound.
I have been teaching at college level for more than thirty years, in the USA and Mexico.
I graduated form the PhD program with an experimental and transdisciplinary dissertation suite that includes:
—"Everything is Otherthing: Bruce Bickford's animation streams”: An essay about the relationship between animism and animation through underground/outsider animator Bruce Bickford's stop-motion streams, exploring the aesthetic, technological, political and ecological implications of granting ”liveness” to the non-living;
— "Paranoid Nightmares of a Fugitive Reality: Mind MGMT”: An essay in the form of a comic about Matt Kind's MIND MGMT comic books, media, paranoia, surveillance and conspiracy theories;
— “Propagand dyptich, Comité Magonista”: Two ”propaganda” video-essays dealing, through appropriated footage and typographical animation, with the symbolic and material violence of the US/Mexico border;
— “Tierra y Libertad”: A designed booklet recounting the activities of the Magonista Committee Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom), a series of interventions and erformative actions through which we have tried to re-incorporate the ”Tierra y Libertad” flag —first raised in Tijuana by an international anarcho-communist army at the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution— to the Tijuana/San Diego edgelands through collective and experimental flagmaking and repurposing of the Flores Magón archives.
— ”How to Misread Properly: The Metaphor in the Real”: The main component of the suite, in which I study how the literalization of metaphors has been pathologized throughout colonization and modernity. I focus on indigenous ontologies, fundamentalism, magic, conspiracy theories and psychiatric and psychoanalytical conceptions of madness. Using critical media theory and speculative fiction as a halfway example between proper and improper readings of
metaphor, I argue for the affordances of improper readings and its prophetic, critical and world-building possibilities, as well as against the dangers of proper readings, and how this abstract process gains materiality in speculative finances, colonization and the US/Mexico border wall. The proper and improper protocols of interpretation actually stand for the production of different subjectivities, right in the midst of a global mental health, ecological and political crisis.
PUBLICATIONS:
— ”Borderforms” (with Grant Leuning). Postcollectivity: Situated Knowledge and Practice. Under contract. Editors: Agniezka Jelewska, Michal Krawczak, Julia Reid. Koninklijke Brill. Leiden: 2024.
— “Following Flags: Experimental Mass Production in the Borderlands” (with Grant Leuning). Comunicazioni Sociali: Arts Based Research in Communication and Media Studies. Edited by Nico Carpentier and Johana Sumiala. VP, Italia. January-March 2021.
— "Insurgency, semio-capitalism and the imagination: 2015 notes around Franco Berardi's 'The Uprising'" . Espiral 69. Mexico, October 2019.
— "The Noise, the Count, the Bodies: Ranciere's politics." Espiral 67. Mexico, June 2018.
— "Experimentalism as Estrangement: Cafe Tacuba’s Revés/Yosoy” (with Alejandro Madrid). Experimentalism in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America. Editors: Ana Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, Alejandro Madrid. Oxford University Press, January, 2018.
— "Paranoid Nightmares of a Fugitive Reality: Mind MGMT." Brumal: Research Journal for the Fantastic. Vol. 5.1. Spain. Spring 2017.
— "Desperately Looking for Others ." LARB. May, 2016.
— "Border Technologies: Feeling a little post-mexican today?". Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Editors: Mark Dery and Nahief Yehya. Routledge, May 2015.