Diana Flores Ruíz

Diana Flores Ruíz examines forms of mediation that produce and facilitate structures of racialized violence, as well as artistic and activist modes of visual resistance. Her current book project investigates the technological construction of the U.S.-Mexico border through the lenses of apprehension and Latinx visual critique. Spanning from the border’s cartographic founding to its current virtual, biometric capacity, Dr. Ruíz analyzes a constellation of photography, cinema, surveillance, and machine vision to demonstrate how visual cultures of the border constitute differential racial emplacements of mobility and itinerant political subjectivities. Her work appears in Film Quarterly, The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Stanford UP, 2018), and a forthcoming anthology on materiality and performance in the built environments of Mexico City (UAM Cuajimalpa). Her research has been funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies.