Diana Flores Ruíz is a feminist media scholar researching the sociotechnical media infrastructures of the US-Mexico border. Her approach encompasses a broad constellation of media objects produced by the state, information and defense technology companies, popular culture, activists, and independent artists of color. From these sources, she weaves cultural and historical analyses that detail the media ecologies shaping the mobilities, capture, and creative resistance of historically exploited border communities and people on the move. By bridging studies of carceral optics and liberatory visual practices, her work situates readings of emergent forms of data capture and digital incarceration within a longer historical continuum of settler colonial visual regimes and community-based resistance.

Flores Ruíz's Digital Hummanities Summer Fellowship project, Mapping Digital Discriminatory Media, will gather, organize, preserve, contextualize, and interpret amateur-produced nativist images and video from 2000-2010. It is archivally motivated around the digital precarity of images and video historically used to motivate violence against Central American border crossers, with a critical emphasis of removing these discriminatory media from their original contexts. It preserves these objects of analysis for critical study, rather than resource pooling for white nationalist citational purposes.