Lupe Alberto Flores

Lupe Alberto Flores is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He specializes in the anthropologies of borders, migration and the state; critical ethnic and Chicanx/Latinx Studies; digital migration studies; feminist surveillance studies, science and technology studies and ethnographic writing. 

Lupe's current book project, Innovating In/Security: Algorithmic Border Violence and Techno-Resistance Along the Migrant Trail, is a multi-sited ethnography of how digital innovation and humanitarian interventions intersect through the development of new technologies for asylum and global migration governance in the extended borderlands between Mexico and the United States. It scrutinizes the transnational state security discourses and tactics behind the design and implementation of algorithmic systems such as CBP One™ and COMAR Digital, shedding light on their sociocultural impacts on everyday life and reconfiguration of in/security, violence and resistance. By connecting the stories of different social actors—such as software engineers, aid workers, asylum seekers and even Latinx cultural icons—Innovating In/Security traces bureaucratic transformations in migration governmentality in the AI-powered digital age, demonstrating how algorithmic border violence shape-shifts across political, socio-technical, expressive and popular cultural forms, how it layers onto histories of narco-violencia, as well as engenders techno-disobedience across territorial-virtual boundaries. 

Lupe earned his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at Rice University, where he also completed certificates in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Critical and Cultural Theory. His research and writing have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the School for Advanced Research, and The Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies.