PhD candidate at UCLA
Salvador Herrera (Sal) is a PhD candidate, researcher, and teaching assistant at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is currently a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellow with the Inter-University Program for Latino Research. As an interdisciplinary scholar of English, Performance, and Latinx Studies, he studies TransBorder aesthetics in order to address the limitations of identity politics for confronting the violence of the border apparatus, along with media outlets that exploit narratives of migrant trauma. TransBorder art is an experimental form situated between dystopic political realities and a speculative future beyond borders as imagined through queer and trans* modalities. He has written several articles for Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, along with an article on race, cybernetics, and the role of mediation in border subject formation as part of a 2021 special issue of Intertexts: A Journal of Comparative and Theoretical Reflection. His work draws and builds from Lacanian psychoanalysis, world-systems theory, and Chicana feminism.
