Lisa A Flores
Biographic Data
| ID | 102989 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa A Flores |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa A |
| FAMILY NAME | Flores |
| SIGNATURE | FLORES L A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5844-9957 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Affective routes and the politics of possibility
In 2025, Black faith leaders mobilized Black and allied communities to commit to a a 40-day Lenten fast of Target stores. Premised in histories and legacies of Black resistance, the Target Fast located the urgency of the movement as it called for a redirection of shopping patterns away from corporate greed and toward Black economic agency. In this essay, we consider the larger discourse around the Fast as we think across two scholarly conversatio…
That Machine Does Not Want Us: CBP OneTM and Migrant Im/mobility in the Extended Mexico-US Borderlands
This article demonstrates how the implementation of punitive asylum policies and digital technologies such as the CBP OneTM Mobile Application have affected the experiences of waiting and violence for asylum-seeking migrants along the extended Mexico-US borderlands. It situates CBP OneTM within the "Anti-Refugee Machine" by theorizing the production of automated border inspections and digital migration deterrence. These external bordering tactics…
Migration and more: The entanglements within and beyond the Immigration Act of 1924
This forum brings scholars across rhetorical interests together in conversation around the 100-year anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924. The six essays consider the overt legislation—border regulation—within its historic, ongoing, and contemporary significance. Asking questions that consider borders, migration, and regulation broadly, the authors here move through questions of surveillance, belonging, space, militarization, embodiment, and…
Racialized temporalities and rhetorical violence
Reflecting upon the words of Professors De Genova, Lozano, and Yam, this essay suggests that rhetorical scholars attend to the intersections between rhetorical violence and rhetorical temporalities. The varied projects that emerge in this forum together suggest that the racialized temporalities of violence rely upon temporalities of relentless and repetition. Together, relentlessness and repetition make race. They do so, within white supremacy an…
The displaced border
This multisited flash ethnography recounts my encounters with a queer asylum seeker from El Salvador trying to move on from a tragedy amid family and legal issues and our observations of the encroaching humanitarian border industry throughout Mexico. It traces events across time and place that are inevitably scarred by the Mexico-US border, which displaces itself beyond territorial lines
Revisioning Rhetorical Violence in the Afterlife
In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to th…
Deportable and Disposable: "Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal" Immigrant
On Racial Violence
Over the last year, at least six children in the U.S. have died as a consequence of the Trump Administration’s move to detain migrants at the U.S./Mexico border. Their deaths, easily preventable, are a microscopic measure of the larger historical assault on raced bodies. Simultaneously incomprehensible and not all that surprising, the legacies of racial violence against Black and non-Black people of color in the U.S. move at a pace that eludes co…
Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant
In the 1920s, the US government passed legislation against undocumented entry into the country, and as a result the figure of the “illegal alien” took form in the national discourse. In this book, Lisa A. Flores explores the history of our language about Mexican immigrants and exposes how our words made these migrants “illegal.” Deportable and Disposable brings a rhetorical lens to a question that has predominantly concerned historians: how do di…
Disciplinary containment: Whiteness and the academic scarcity narrative
Amid rising controversy around the alleged distinctions between merit and excellence lies a familiar refrain, scarcity. The narrative of academic scarcity, proclaiming the insufficient numbers of scholars and academics of color, permeates conversations in higher education. We suggest that the academic scarcity narrative, a remnant of stagnant logics of diversity, circulates as a contemporary mechanism of what we name disciplinary containment. Ext…
Unmasking “ignorance”
Recent years have seen rising public talk around voting access and voter suppression, particularly as linked to marginalized and disenfranchised populations. In this reflection, we assess varied such public conversations and identify an interesting narrative encapsulating both those arguing voter suppression as a rising concern and those minimizing such claims. Organized around “ignorance,” this metanarrative does the rhetorical work of containme…
At the Intersections: Feminist Border Theory
In June 2018, a flood of images and news stories emerged on the national scene: children in cages; frightened and desperate parents unsure and lost. The response, across the country, was immediate
At, Of, and Beyond the Intersections
The cultural politics of 2019, like those of recent years, have been marked with a number of critical controversies. Whether in the rising swirl of voices saying #MeToo or calling the movement into
Towards an insistent and transformative racial rhetorical criticism
Racial rhetorical criticism is a scholarly project that maps the rhetoricity of race and whiteness. Emerging in and through the intellectual labor of rhetorical scholars invested in critical explorations of race, racial rhetorical criticism is necessarily nimble, attentive to the ever-shifting yet always fixed parameters of race and whiteness. In this reflection, I advance two commitments of racial rhetorical criticism that emerge across the foru…
Laboring to Belong: Differentiation, Spatial Relocation, and the Ironic Presence of (Un)Documented Immigrants in the United Farm Workers “Take Our Jobs” Campaign
In 2010, the United Farm Workers (UFW) launched a campaign titled “Take Our Jobs!” Explicitly directed at “Americans,” the campaign promised UFW training to applicants for jobs in the nation’s fields. With references to (un)documented immigrants within the nation, the campaign located debates on immigration within the nation, not at the border. I argue that the campaign relied upon irony and visibility politics, generating a logic of absurd reali…
Preamble
Attending to the Urgencies: Gendered Violence and Violent Gender
In December 2017, Time magazine made its annual announcement of Person of the Year, naming the Silence Breakers, those “women everywhere [who] have begun to speak up about the inappropriate, abusiv
Introduction: Of Gendered/Racial Boundaries and Borders
Inclusivity. Equality. They seem like reasonable standards or ideals of citizenship. After all, both are basic values in the mythos of the founding of the United States. The United States is suppos
Introduction: Centering Communication Scholarship in the Wake of Political Turmoil
The 2016 presidential election will surely stand for some time as a landmark election. Not only was this the first presidential election in U.S. history in which a woman candidate was the nominee o
Introducing the Discussion and One Another
Over a month-long period, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication hosted an online discussion among 11 intercultural scholars across and outside of the discipline in response to four key questions. Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rona Halualani, facilitated the discussion and introduced the question prompts. The goal was to create a vibrant, interactive dialogue about definitional framings of intercultural scholarship and their views of…
Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us
In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship
Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today's World: Connecting Our Scholarship to Dynamic Contexts and Historical Moments
In the next section of the discussion, the participating scholars elaborate on their views of the most pressing intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges that we face in today's world. The discussants identify both historically persistent and newly emerging challenges and crises that greatly impact our world's communities, their health and well-being, the environment, war and violence, oppression, domination, resistance, and political conse…
Our Role as Intercultural Scholars, Practitioners, Activists, and Teachers in Addressing These Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges
As the finale, the participating scholars connect their discussion of key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges to our role as intercultural scholars and the pathways for engagement. We all inhabit different and multiple roles for addressing and confronting such urgencies—as researchers, practitioners, activists, teachers, and community members with macro and micro modes of agency, influence, and impact. Discussants grapple with how to …
The Rhetorical “Realness” of Race, or Why Critical Race Rhetoricians Need Performance Studies
Across critical whiteness studies, both within communication and across varied disciplines, scholars repeatedly reference bodies and perception. Consider, for instance, historian Matthew Frye Jacob
Dynamic Rhetorics of Race: California's Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics
In October 2003, Californians voted in the high-profile gubernatorial recall election and on what is referred to as the “Racial Privacy Initiative.” The Initiative sought to prohibit the gathering of racial data in education and state employment. Unlike recent such initiatives addressing California's racial laws, this one was unsuccessful: 62 percent of voters said no. This essay examines the discourse surrounding the initiative over its three-ye…
Slaves with white collars: Persistent performances of masculinity in crisis
Recent trends in popular culture suggest an emerging discourse of professional masculinity in crisis. This essay examines two illustrative films, Fight Club and In the Company of Men, whose characters bemoan the impending demise of the masculine businessman. To revive him, they (re)turn to what we call a "civilized/primitive" masculinity, embodied by the hardened white man who finds healing in wounds. This subjectivity shrouds the race and class …
Dynamic Rhetorics of Race: California's Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics
In October 2003, Californians voted in the high-profile gubernatorial recall election and on what is referred to as the “Racial Privacy Initiative.” The Initiative sought to prohibit the gathering of racial data in education and state employment. Unlike recent such initiatives addressing California's racial laws, this one was unsuccessful: 62 percent of voters said no. This essay examines the discourse surrounding the initiative over its three-ye…
Reclaiming the “Other”: Toward a Chicana feminist critical perspective
Creating discursive space through a rhetoric of difference: Chicana feminists craft a homeland
When Chicana feminists refuse to accept mainstream definitions of themselves and insist that they establish and affirm their own identity, they build a space through discourse. For Chicana feminists, this process is accomplished in three stages. They begin by merely carving out a space within which they can find their own voice. After establishing this space, they begin to turn it into a home where connections to those within their families are m…
Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us
In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship
Disciplinary containment: Whiteness and the academic scarcity narrative
Amid rising controversy around the alleged distinctions between merit and excellence lies a familiar refrain, scarcity. The narrative of academic scarcity, proclaiming the insufficient numbers of scholars and academics of color, permeates conversations in higher education. We suggest that the academic scarcity narrative, a remnant of stagnant logics of diversity, circulates as a contemporary mechanism of what we name disciplinary containment. Ext…
Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today's World: Connecting Our Scholarship to Dynamic Contexts and Historical Moments
In the next section of the discussion, the participating scholars elaborate on their views of the most pressing intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges that we face in today's world. The discussants identify both historically persistent and newly emerging challenges and crises that greatly impact our world's communities, their health and well-being, the environment, war and violence, oppression, domination, resistance, and political conse…
Our Role as Intercultural Scholars, Practitioners, Activists, and Teachers in Addressing These Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges
As the finale, the participating scholars connect their discussion of key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges to our role as intercultural scholars and the pathways for engagement. We all inhabit different and multiple roles for addressing and confronting such urgencies—as researchers, practitioners, activists, teachers, and community members with macro and micro modes of agency, influence, and impact. Discussants grapple with how to …
The Rhetorical “Realness” of Race, or Why Critical Race Rhetoricians Need Performance Studies
Across critical whiteness studies, both within communication and across varied disciplines, scholars repeatedly reference bodies and perception. Consider, for instance, historian Matthew Frye Jacob
That Machine Does Not Want Us: CBP OneTM and Migrant Im/mobility in the Extended Mexico-US Borderlands
This article demonstrates how the implementation of punitive asylum policies and digital technologies such as the CBP OneTM Mobile Application have affected the experiences of waiting and violence for asylum-seeking migrants along the extended Mexico-US borderlands. It situates CBP OneTM within the "Anti-Refugee Machine" by theorizing the production of automated border inspections and digital migration deterrence. These external bordering tactics…
At the Intersections: Feminist Border Theory
In June 2018, a flood of images and news stories emerged on the national scene: children in cages; frightened and desperate parents unsure and lost. The response, across the country, was immediate
Towards an insistent and transformative racial rhetorical criticism
Racial rhetorical criticism is a scholarly project that maps the rhetoricity of race and whiteness. Emerging in and through the intellectual labor of rhetorical scholars invested in critical explorations of race, racial rhetorical criticism is necessarily nimble, attentive to the ever-shifting yet always fixed parameters of race and whiteness. In this reflection, I advance two commitments of racial rhetorical criticism that emerge across the foru…
Laboring to Belong: Differentiation, Spatial Relocation, and the Ironic Presence of (Un)Documented Immigrants in the United Farm Workers “Take Our Jobs” Campaign
In 2010, the United Farm Workers (UFW) launched a campaign titled “Take Our Jobs!” Explicitly directed at “Americans,” the campaign promised UFW training to applicants for jobs in the nation’s fields. With references to (un)documented immigrants within the nation, the campaign located debates on immigration within the nation, not at the border. I argue that the campaign relied upon irony and visibility politics, generating a logic of absurd reali…
Introduction: Of Gendered/Racial Boundaries and Borders
Inclusivity. Equality. They seem like reasonable standards or ideals of citizenship. After all, both are basic values in the mythos of the founding of the United States. The United States is suppos
Creating discursive space through a rhetoric of difference: Chicana feminists craft a homeland
When Chicana feminists refuse to accept mainstream definitions of themselves and insist that they establish and affirm their own identity, they build a space through discourse. For Chicana feminists, this process is accomplished in three stages. They begin by merely carving out a space within which they can find their own voice. After establishing this space, they begin to turn it into a home where connections to those within their families are m…
From black and white to living color: A dialogic exposition into the social (re) construction of race, gender, and crime
Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness." By Herman Gray. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995; pp.xii + 201; cloth $22.95. Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities. By Angharad N. Valdivia (Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995; pp. viii + 332; paper $19.95. Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. By Gregg Barak (Ed.). New York: Garland…
Colloquy Challenges in Contemporary Culture and Communication Research
Journal Article Colloquy: Challenges in Contemporary Culture and Communication Research Get access Judith N. Martin, Judith N. Martin 1Judith N. Martin (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 1980) is an associate professor of communication at Arizona State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lisa A. Flores Lisa A. Flores 2Lisa A. Flares (Ph.D., University of Georgia, 1994) is an assistant professor …
Reclaiming the “Other”: Toward a Chicana feminist critical perspective
Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration
Recent work in immigration suggests interconnections among race, nation, and immigration. This essay examines these relations, noting the rhetorical dynamics through which symbolic borders emerge and shift, in part through national debates over immigrants. Turning critical attention to mediated representations of Mexican immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, I argue that Mexican immigrant bodies provided rhetorical space for a national discussion of…
Slaves with white collars: Persistent performances of masculinity in crisis
Recent trends in popular culture suggest an emerging discourse of professional masculinity in crisis. This essay examines two illustrative films, Fight Club and In the Company of Men, whose characters bemoan the impending demise of the masculine businessman. To revive him, they (re)turn to what we call a "civilized/primitive" masculinity, embodied by the hardened white man who finds healing in wounds. This subjectivity shrouds the race and class …
Dynamic Rhetorics of Race: California's Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics
In October 2003, Californians voted in the high-profile gubernatorial recall election and on what is referred to as the “Racial Privacy Initiative.” The Initiative sought to prohibit the gathering of racial data in education and state employment. Unlike recent such initiatives addressing California's racial laws, this one was unsuccessful: 62 percent of voters said no. This essay examines the discourse surrounding the initiative over its three-ye…
The Rhetorical “Realness” of Race, or Why Critical Race Rhetoricians Need Performance Studies
Across critical whiteness studies, both within communication and across varied disciplines, scholars repeatedly reference bodies and perception. Consider, for instance, historian Matthew Frye Jacob
Introducing the Discussion and One Another
Over a month-long period, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication hosted an online discussion among 11 intercultural scholars across and outside of the discipline in response to four key questions. Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rona Halualani, facilitated the discussion and introduced the question prompts. The goal was to create a vibrant, interactive dialogue about definitional framings of intercultural scholarship and their views of…
Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us
In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship
Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today's World: Connecting Our Scholarship to Dynamic Contexts and Historical Moments
In the next section of the discussion, the participating scholars elaborate on their views of the most pressing intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges that we face in today's world. The discussants identify both historically persistent and newly emerging challenges and crises that greatly impact our world's communities, their health and well-being, the environment, war and violence, oppression, domination, resistance, and political conse…
Our Role as Intercultural Scholars, Practitioners, Activists, and Teachers in Addressing These Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges
As the finale, the participating scholars connect their discussion of key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges to our role as intercultural scholars and the pathways for engagement. We all inhabit different and multiple roles for addressing and confronting such urgencies—as researchers, practitioners, activists, teachers, and community members with macro and micro modes of agency, influence, and impact. Discussants grapple with how to …
Introduction: Of Gendered/Racial Boundaries and Borders
Inclusivity. Equality. They seem like reasonable standards or ideals of citizenship. After all, both are basic values in the mythos of the founding of the United States. The United States is suppos
Introduction: Centering Communication Scholarship in the Wake of Political Turmoil
The 2016 presidential election will surely stand for some time as a landmark election. Not only was this the first presidential election in U.S. history in which a woman candidate was the nominee o
Towards an insistent and transformative racial rhetorical criticism
Racial rhetorical criticism is a scholarly project that maps the rhetoricity of race and whiteness. Emerging in and through the intellectual labor of rhetorical scholars invested in critical explorations of race, racial rhetorical criticism is necessarily nimble, attentive to the ever-shifting yet always fixed parameters of race and whiteness. In this reflection, I advance two commitments of racial rhetorical criticism that emerge across the foru…
Laboring to Belong: Differentiation, Spatial Relocation, and the Ironic Presence of (Un)Documented Immigrants in the United Farm Workers “Take Our Jobs” Campaign
In 2010, the United Farm Workers (UFW) launched a campaign titled “Take Our Jobs!” Explicitly directed at “Americans,” the campaign promised UFW training to applicants for jobs in the nation’s fields. With references to (un)documented immigrants within the nation, the campaign located debates on immigration within the nation, not at the border. I argue that the campaign relied upon irony and visibility politics, generating a logic of absurd reali…
Preamble
Attending to the Urgencies: Gendered Violence and Violent Gender
In December 2017, Time magazine made its annual announcement of Person of the Year, naming the Silence Breakers, those “women everywhere [who] have begun to speak up about the inappropriate, abusiv
At the Intersections: Feminist Border Theory
In June 2018, a flood of images and news stories emerged on the national scene: children in cages; frightened and desperate parents unsure and lost. The response, across the country, was immediate
At, Of, and Beyond the Intersections
The cultural politics of 2019, like those of recent years, have been marked with a number of critical controversies. Whether in the rising swirl of voices saying #MeToo or calling the movement into
Deportable and Disposable: "Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal" Immigrant
On Racial Violence
Over the last year, at least six children in the U.S. have died as a consequence of the Trump Administration’s move to detain migrants at the U.S./Mexico border. Their deaths, easily preventable, are a microscopic measure of the larger historical assault on raced bodies. Simultaneously incomprehensible and not all that surprising, the legacies of racial violence against Black and non-Black people of color in the U.S. move at a pace that eludes co…
Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant
In the 1920s, the US government passed legislation against undocumented entry into the country, and as a result the figure of the “illegal alien” took form in the national discourse. In this book, Lisa A. Flores explores the history of our language about Mexican immigrants and exposes how our words made these migrants “illegal.” Deportable and Disposable brings a rhetorical lens to a question that has predominantly concerned historians: how do di…
Disciplinary containment: Whiteness and the academic scarcity narrative
Amid rising controversy around the alleged distinctions between merit and excellence lies a familiar refrain, scarcity. The narrative of academic scarcity, proclaiming the insufficient numbers of scholars and academics of color, permeates conversations in higher education. We suggest that the academic scarcity narrative, a remnant of stagnant logics of diversity, circulates as a contemporary mechanism of what we name disciplinary containment. Ext…
Unmasking “ignorance”
Recent years have seen rising public talk around voting access and voter suppression, particularly as linked to marginalized and disenfranchised populations. In this reflection, we assess varied such public conversations and identify an interesting narrative encapsulating both those arguing voter suppression as a rising concern and those minimizing such claims. Organized around “ignorance,” this metanarrative does the rhetorical work of containme…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)