Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas is an interdisciplinary scholar in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. Locating her research at the intersections of Critical Race Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, Geography,  and Law,  her work focuses on race, prisons, and policing and interrogates the critical questions: What lives constitute an ethical crisis? And what is the contemporary value embedded in the practice of racial violence? She was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and has taught extensively in the UC system. She is currently completing her manuscript, Mortifications of the Flesh: Racial Violence in a Time of Crisis, which maps the historical continuities and discontinuities of policing and state violence on the material and discursive terrains of law, visual cultural productions, and raced populations. She is also at work on a second book, Policing L.A.’s Human Terrain: The Criminal Non-Human at Point Zero, which examines Los Angeles County Jail as a critical point on the city’s cartography of productive human terrain.

As part of the Global Latinidades Consortium, Cuevas will work on redefining Latinx intra-nationalisms and internationalisms to include the implications of state control on one’s being and the geographical terrain they occupy. She will pay particular attention to Latinx community responses that involve appeals to international frameworks, from human rights protocols to various revolutionary paradigms.