IMPORTANT
The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine and Resistance
Humanities Forum with Karma Chávez
Tuesday, February 23, 2021 · 4 - 5:30 PM
Karma R. Chávez, Chair and Associate Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
In this talk, Karma Chávez discusses how, throughout US history, disease has provided an opportunity to alienize or render people foreign to the nation. She draws on her forthcoming book, The Borders of AIDS, to show how the case of HIV/AIDS helps illuminate this process. She demonstrates how those most impacted by this alienizing logic resisted their oppression and draws connections to similar processes in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaker Bio: Karma R. Chávez teaches, writes, and currently serves as chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also holds several affiliate faculty appointments. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013), Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019), and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021).
Sponsored by Dresher Center for the Humanities; the Department of American Studies; the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; and the Latino and Hispanic Faculty Association.
Photo provided by speaker.
[Image description: Karma R. Chávez, a Latinx woman, smiles at the camera. She has chin-length, wavy brown hair and she is wearing a light-colored button up shirt.]
