This event is presented in collaboration with the Institute for International and Regional Studies National Resource Center (IRIS NRC); Center for the Humanities; and the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS).

Karma Chavez is Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and Chair, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Their scholarship is primarily informed by queer of color theory and women of color feminism. Her work emphasizes the rhetorical practices of groups marginalized within existing power structures, but she also attends to rhetoric produced by powerful institutions and actors about marginalized folks and the systems that oppress them (e.g., immigration system, prisons etc.). Methodologically, she is a rhetorical critic who utilizes textual and field-based methods. Chavez is interested in studying social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics.

Her first book, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, which examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States, was published in 2013. Palestine on the Air, a compilation of interviews conducted while hosting a radio show on WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin, related to Palestine was released in 2019. Her latest book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance was released from the University of Washington Press in June 2021 and centers citizenship and immigration status to tell a story about how HIV/AIDS became an opportunity for powerful people in the US to enact "alienizing logic" against migrants, Black folks, and others. It also shows how people fought back.

She has co-edited four volumes, Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (with Eithne Luibhéid, U of Illinois Press), Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (with the Feminist Editorial Collective: other members are: Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Aren Z. Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, and Amber Jamilla Musser, NYU Press), Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (with Cindy L. Griffin, SUNY Press) and Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press).
Chavez is at work on a collection of essays about our community-university collaborations in Madison, Wisconsin called After Ferguson: Black, Queer, Feminist Experiments Against Police and Jails with M. Adams, as well as finishing a book of creative non-fiction essays on race, belonging, and the midwestern United States. In addition to her research, she is a regular host of the Latino Studies podcast, LatinXperts. She co-hosts Feminist Keywords, the podcast companion to Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. On occasion, Chavez serves as host on A Public Affair on Madison, Wisconsin's community radio station, WORT-FM.