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 anthropology of borders and the state, critical ethnic and migration studies, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, feminist surveillance studies and science and technology studies. Lupe's book project, Surveilling Im/mobilities Under the Digital Security State, ethnographically investigates the internal and external bordering effects of punitive asylum policies and digital innovation projects in Mexico and the US. It scrutinizes the digitalization of transnational security state practices alongside the implementation of humanitarian interventions in the management of global asylum migration. By juxtaposing the affective encounters between differently positioned actors along the migrant trail – asylum-seeking migrants, Mexican activists and aid workers, American state actors and software engineers, even Latinx cultural icons – Lupe showcases the transnational security logics and socio-technical bordering practices of emergent state effects and expressive/popular cultural forms that are enacted, experienced and contested across the digital Mexico-US borderlands in the twenty-first century.

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 Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the School for Advanced Research.