5 Questions with Dr. Iván Chaar López

AMS : ATX is thrilled to sit down with Dr. Iván Chaar López, who joined the UT AMS faculty in Fall 2020. Dr. Chaar López’s work examines the politics and aesthetics of digital technologies and the place of Latina/o/xs as targets, users, and developers of digital lifeworlds. He is currently working on a book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion, and a number of other exciting projects here at UT. After earning his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Dr. Chaar López completed a Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship in Latino/a Studies and Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University.

Read on to learn more about Dr. Chaar López’s academic background, current research and projects, and teaching, and check out his website here!

1. To start, what is your academic background? How does this inform your work today?

Being born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I got my bachelors and masters in History at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, also known as “la iupi.” While at la iupi, I grew interested in meaning making practices and the role of technology in these processes. That led to a master's thesis devoted to studying a filmed event of police violence in Puerto Rico in 2007. A few police agents intervened with a man participating in a quinceañera caravan. Their intervention quickly became lethally violent and one of the officers shot the man. The event was recorded on a digital camera, given to Univision, transmitted on the evening news, and recorded by someone who then uploaded it to YouTube. The filmed incident quickly became a viral event. The social network site platform had only existed for 2 years and was dominated by video logs, personal videos focusing on personal stories. Puerto Ricans, however, made quick use of the site as a platform to organize against state and police violence. I was intrigued by these dynamics and knew I wanted to continue to think about information technologies and politics. And that’s what I did when I pursued my doctoral degree at the University of Michigan between 2012-2018.

2. How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society? I'm particularly interested in hearing about how you situate your work with The Precarity Lab.

I continue to think, research, and write about information technologies and politics through the framework afforded by space and place. I’m especially interested with the ways borderlands can be understood in relation to technology, that is both as a site of technological development and as a technology itself—an artifact for drawing out relations, making sense. I see this way of approaching information technologies as part of a growing push to think science and technology through the methodological toolboxes of critical race theory, feminist practices, and imperial formations.

The Precarity Lab, of which I’ve been a founding member since 2016, has pursued a research agenda committed to understanding digital technologies in a context of intensifying precarization and capitalist crisis. The vast reach and complexity of networked technologies required, we thought, a different way to examine them, one that would be interdisciplinary, multi-sited, and comparative. To pursue this research agenda, we experimented with collaborative research and writing. And so all of the members and collaborators of the lab have their own (inter)disciplinary expertise (i.e., Information Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latina/o Studies, African American Studies, STS, Ethnography, History) and geographical areas of focus (i.e., the US, Europe, China, Palestine, US-Mexico border, South Asia). The results are two co-written pieces, one published by Social Text and the book Technoprecarious, which just came out at the end of 2020.

3. What sort of classes do you teach at UT? How does your research inform your teaching?

I haven’t been at UT long; I began my position in August 2020. Most of my classes are at the intersection of Digital Studies, Science & Technology Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies. I’ve taught an undergrad class on “Digital Cultures” (AMS 370, previously titled “Art & Data in the Digital Age”), and this semester I’m teaching a graduate course on “Borderlands, Technology, Race” and an “Introduction to American Studies” that uses computers and the Internet as its core objects of study. The classes I teach, then, draw heavily from my areas of expertise.

4. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?

I’m working on a few projects at the moment. My main project is my book manuscript, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion, which grapples with the central role information technologies have played in border enforcement since the mid-twentieth century.

I’m also thrilled to be establishing the Border Tech Lab at UT Austin. The BTL draws inspiration from my experience in Precarity Lab where, first as a Ph.D. candidate and then as a postdoc, I worked closely with a range of thinkers. As the principal investigator of the BTL, I will work closely with undergraduate and graduate students to pursue interdisciplinary research on technologies and boundary production. We will ask how knowledge communities and technologies push the boundaries of imagination even as they work to delineate the boundaries of the possible. We will begin working on two projects. One is devoted to researching the place of anti-immigrant nativist organizations in the use of unmanned aerial systems. The other centers on the history of electronics manufacturing along the US-Mexico borderlands since the 1960s as a way to interrogate the technopolitics of special economic zones, non-essential knowledge, and disposability.

5. And, finally, the million-dollar question: if you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?

I’m the last person to support fixing a definition of our field, so consider this a contingent, unstable, and changing description: American Studies is an interdisciplinary practice that pays close attention to the experiences of people in and in relation to the U.S., and its cultural and social formations.