El SIDA Nos Afecta a Todos: AIDS Activism in and for Latinx Immigrant Communities in the Early Years of HIV/AIDS

About This Event

This talk will feature research from Dr. Karma Chávez’s new book project, 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).

Dr. Chávez is an Associate Professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Her scholarship is informed by queer of color theory and women of color feminism and analyzes social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics. Dr. Chávez’s research explores the rhetorical practices and coalitions of marginalized groups within existing power structures. She also examines rhetoric produced by powerful institutions and actors about marginalized peoples and the systems that oppress them, such as the immigration system and prisons.

Dr. Chávez’s current co-authored project, After Ferguson: Black, Queer, Feminist Experiments Against Police and Jails, examines community-university collaborations in Madison, Wisconsin. Her previous book Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, published in 2013, examined coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. She has also published two coedited volumes Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies.

Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and affiliate in the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the LGBTQ Studies Program, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is co-editor of Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (with Sara McKinnon, Robert Asen and Robert Glenn Howard, Penn State Press, 2016), Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (with Cindy L. Griffin, SUNY Press, 2012), and author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013). Karma is also a member of the radical queer collective Against Equality.